


Blood On My Name

by ash818



Series: Legacy [3]
Category: Arrow (TV 2012)
Genre: Action/Adventure, Canon-Typical Violence, Crime Fighting, Depression, Drama, Established Relationship, F/M, Family, Future Fic, Gen, Kid Fic, Mental Health Issues, Next-Gen, Smartmouth Narrator, Vigilantism, Warm and Fuzzy Feelings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-20
Updated: 2015-06-16
Packaged: 2018-03-18 17:50:23
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 9
Words: 57,962
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3578463
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ash818/pseuds/ash818
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In the spring of 2042, victory and tragedy rocked the Queens' world. Six months later Jonathan and his family are still trying to find their feet in this new normal. Then a string of gruesome murders shocks Starling, and when the killer targets someone close to Jon, the Arrow must face down a whole new kind of threat.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Many thanks to Abbie and RosieTwiggs for their incredible generosity with their time, attention, enthusiasm, and insight. Some more thanks plus a big hug to effie214 for the read-through and the amazing comments. None of this would ever get written without these ladies.
> 
> The title is shamelessly ripped from a song of the same name by the Brothers Bright.

The entire swanky uptown apartment smells of soured vomit.

“What a mess,” I mutter.

Chief of Police McKenna Hall startles. Then she catches sight of me crouched in the window, and I remember how much she hates being snuck up on. “It’s astute observations like that that make me so glad I called you.”

“What are you doing here personally?” I say, slipping into the room and keeping to the shadows outside the clamped-up work lights the forensics team set up. “Don’t you have minions for this?”

Hall ignores that. I guess the brand new Chief of the most corrupt department in the country is entitled to a little micromanagement.

“Richard Belfort, fifty-nine,” she says, sliding her hands in her pockets and pacing a circle around the contorted body on the floor. His tailored suit is covered in his own waste, and his arms and legs are locked at horrible, crabbed angles. “Venture capitalist and philanthropist. His wife found him a few hours ago.”

One of the dining room chairs has been overturned, and at its empty place stands a glass of red wine all by its lonesome. “Poison.”

Hall nods. “It will go to the lab, but the EMTs say it’s most likely strychnine.”

In my ear, Watchtower makes a noise of distaste. “Not a nice way to go at all. You die of exhaustion and oxygen deprivation from the convulsions, and that can take hours.”

I look at Belfort’s bared, gritted teeth, scrunched-shut eyes, and arched back. “I thought that went out of style decades ago.”

“No one who’s trying to be sneaky kills with such a well-known poison anymore,” Hall say, “but our murderer wanted to make a statement.” She gestures to the trendy paint job on the far wall, where a knife has carved out _DEUT 19:20_.

“Deuteronomy. That one’s the law, right?”

“You sound unsure,” Mom mutters in my ear. “How are you not sure? Oh God, I’m the worst Jewish mother ever.”

I close my eyes and think as loudly as I can: _Trying to work here, Mom_.

“Sorry,” she says, businesslike again. “The rest of the people will hear of this and be - ”

“The rest of the people will hear of this and be afraid,” Hall says at the same time, reading from her glassbook, “and never again will such an evil thing be done among you.”

I sigh. “Because what is a revenge kill without some out-of-context Scripture?”

“What indeed,” Hall mutters.

I stand over Belfort with my back to the work light, and the shadow of the arrows in my quiver falls across his agonized face. “What did he do that was so evil?”

“He had ties to dozens of organizations a psycho could target him for,” Hall says, dragging up a list on her glassbook and pulling the holograph off the surface to show me. “Environmental groups hate his oil industry connections. Pro-life groups hate the big checks he writes to Planned Parenthood. He donated millions to Congressional candidates in the last election, one of whom was involved in that tissue trafficking scandal. It will take some narrowing down.”

“You don’t need my help with that.” Mom can dig deeper and faster than the people who need warrants, but the end result is going to be the same. “Admit it, you just wanted to see me.”

She gives me the tolerant smile people give precocious children. “I have a bad feeling about this one. I figured I should fight weird with weird.” Hall holds out her glassbook, and I tap my phone to it to transfer the casefile securely. Then she looks down at my arm. “You’re bleeding.”

Damn it, the knife wound soaked through the bandage again, and it’s running down my sleeve. “See you when I’ve got something, Chief.”

She waves me off, and I slip out the way I came.

One of the advantages of Abigail knowing the big green secret is how much easier it is to bring work home with us. Mom was Watchtowering from her home office, and after a shower and change and a temporary bandage, I head home so she can take care of the gash on the underside of my right forearm. Even if stitching myself up did not make me want to puke, I can’t do it left-handed.

I walk into her study holding up my bloody arm and saying, “Hey, Mom, can you sew me back together?”

Curled up on the loveseat with a notebook and highlighter, my sister looks up wide-eyed.

Shit. “Hey, Abby.”

“What happened?” she says, sitting up. Mom gets up behind her desk and pulls down a suture kit from the cabinet full of med supplies.

“I had a disagreement with a carjacker. It’s ok, it’s nothing serious.” I sink into the chair in front of Mom’s desk and lay my arm out for her.

“So we're going to start with why our killer was so judgy about his victim?” Mom says as she swabs the area with alcohol. “Or her victim. I can’t remember if it’s the majority of poisoners who are female or the majority of female murderers who use poison, but I know it’s a thing.”

“I guess. I’ve never worked a creepy ritualistic murder before. It’s a little out of the Arrow’s wheelhouse, isn’t it?”

“Didn’t Dad catch the Dollmaker?” Abby says.

Mom shudders in recognition, but I have no idea what she’s talking about. Within a few months of learning the truth about the family business, Abby knew more about the history of Team Arrow than I did. She’d reference some long-ago argument Dig and Lyla had over Floyd Lawton or some zany scheme that ended with Mom kidnapped, and I’d stare at her blankly.

“I thought they told you all this.”

They told me what I needed to know. They tell her what they need someone to hear. I don’t think they do it on purpose. She’ll just ask you these questions with her wide blue eyes and her cute nose, and you melt into a puddle of emotional vomit and ugly confessions.

It was through Abby, for example, that I found out what Aunt Thea meant when she told me, _I once tried not being Ollie’s sister. I tried as hard as I could_. “After our grandmother died, she spent some time in Nanda Parbat.” It was Abby who explained that Mom still has nightmares about the way Cooper Seldon died. “Dad wasn’t the first person she ever loved, you know.”

It was Abby who told me that, an hour after I got out of surgery, she came into my hospital room to bring Dad coffee and found him sitting in the farthest corner of the room. “He was kind of bent over and sniffling a little bit. His face was wet.”

“He was - what?”

“He said you’d been scaring the hell out of him since you learned to walk, but this was a new record.”

I had seen my father on the verge of tears maybe two or three times in my life, and only when Mom was missing did I worry that they would actually spill over. Dig told me later that was the night when all the evidence was telling them she was already dead.

I couldn’t picture him actually crying, and it felt wrong to even try. If I’d walked into a room and found that, I’d have backed right out before he could look up, but I knew without asking that Abby went straight for him.

She’s a tough chick, in her way.

Unfortunately, she’s not the breed of tough chick who can watch a needle slide in and out of my arm without turning chalk white. Abby hides in her notebook until Mom is done suturing me up.

When Mom ties off the last stitch, she strips off her gloves and says, “Junebug, come wipe it down with antiseptic and slap a bandage on there.”

Still a little pale, Abby rolls her lips together. Then she gets to her feet and takes the chair next to me. I raise an eyebrow at Mom, who gives me a very definite _I know what I’m doing_ look.

After that night at the mansion, we thought Abby’s nightmares and panic attacks would pass like they did after our first run-in with the Black Hand. But for every few weeks she spent as herself, we got a week of zombie. Sometime in August, after four months of wild mood swings and therapy and medication and more mood swings, my sister started hiding from us. It’s a big house, and you can spend ten or fifteen minutes checking all the reading nooks and closets and small spaces she might curl into like a cat in an Amazon shipping box.

The first time she hid to avoid going to school, I overheard my parents arguing downstairs.

“I’m not going to drag her to the car and force her to go,” Dad said. “Is it really going to do her any good, being completely zoned out at a desk instead of zoned out at home?”

“Oliver, that’s not the point. She had her world rocked not that long ago, and now what she needs most is predictability and consistency. She needs to know what’s coming each day. We have to give her structure.”

“She is the only person in this family who did not sign up for any of this. If she needs to take a day, she can take a day.”

“Signed up or not, she’s part of it now. She needs to feel like part of it, like she’s pulling her weight.”

“I am not asking a fifteen year old who can hardly get out of bed to pull any weight, Felicity.”

“I know you’re not! Is it any wonder she thinks we don’t need her and she’s not good enough?”

I heard two people’s fuming breaths in the sudden silence.

“I’m sorry,” Mom said at last. “I didn’t mean to blame you.”

It’s not like he needs the help. My father collects blame like a hoarder marathoning the home shopping channel. “When we talked about all the ways our past could come back on our family,” he said quietly, “we never talked about this.”

There was a soft, sighing noise. Then: “Oliver?"

Then I heard kissing noises, and I cleared right the hell out.

Ever since, I’ve noticed Mom giving Abby little tasks at the borders of her comfort zone. I guess tonight it’s cleaning the blood from my arm and taping down gauze.

“How’s that?” she says, throwing away the crumpled ball of wax paper backings.

I twist my elbow experimentally a couple of times.“Should hold. Thanks, junebug.”

She forces a smile, still looking a little green around the edges. “Night, Jonny.” She picks up her notebook and highlighter and slips into the hall.

I wait a few seconds for the sound of her footfalls to fade before I turn to Mom. “It’s two in the morning. Nightmares again?”

Mom takes off her glasses and pulls a little cleaning square from her purse. “Vivid dreams are a known side effect of fluoxetine,” she says, rubbing away smudges which may or may not be imaginary. “I think it’s time to try a different medication.”

I rub my temples. “Fourth time lucky?”

She slips her glasses back on. “You get grumpy when it’s past your bedtime.” She gets to her feet, and shuts down her glassbook and library, and hikes her purse onto her shoulder. I follow her into the hall.

Just before we part ways at the top of the stairwell, Mom pats my arm, glancing at Abby’s door. “This will pass. Just try to be patient, honey.”

“Yes. Patience. My strong suit.”

She smiles. “Get some sleep.”

I get a whole five hours before my uncle’s neck starts bubbling blood while my sister cries quietly nearby, cuffed to a water pipe in a dank warehouse. I jerk awake in the half-light, sheets tangled around me. Guess I’m up for the day.

This is going to pass. Patience.

When I dress for work, I put on the tie with the Budweiser frogs that Uncle Roy specifically told me not to wear to Panoptic. He’d know what I meant by it.

I don’t like to think about how many emails are waiting for me at the office.

With my leg in a shiny black cast, I wasn’t good for anything but paperwork. As it turned out, that was fine by Dig and Lyla. Our business is not all exciting fieldwork. It’s also cash flows and tax rates, assets and liabilities, retirement plans, and a thousand other kinds of wacky fun with Excel. For the first time since I graduated, my ability to read a balance sheet became relevant to my life.

In August, I got the official health care professional’s go-ahead to resume combat sports. Dad and I went twelve rounds in the lair, which I think he needed as much as I did, but Dig and Lyla only halfway unshackled me from the desk.

“You’re actually quite good at the business side of it, Jon,” Lyla said.

“No need to sound so surprised,” I grumped.

When I come through the big glass doors, approximately no one is doing anything productive. Dig and Lyla are announcing the new president this afternoon, and it’s all anyone can talk about. Mom shows up to take me to an early lunch, and she lingers afterward for the announcement.

“We’ll be passing the torch to someone whom we’ve been trying to recruit for years now,” Lyla tells the gathered crowd in the bullpen.

They’re going to give what should have been Uncle Roy’s job to an outsider? I glance down at Mom, who is sitting in my desk chair, but she just smiles at me serenely.

“Someone with both the practical knowledge and the executive experience this firm will need to continue moving forward,” Lyla is saying. “Most of you already know her, so I expect she’ll get a warm reception.”

“Ladies and gentlemen,” Dig says, “meet the new president of Panoptic, LLC: Felicity Smoak Queen.”

Mom gets to her feet to very genuine enthusiasm.

I gape at her.

She takes center stage to make a nice little speech. She introduces herself, thanks Dig and Lyla, and tells us how much she’s looking forward to the bear claws in the conference room. “Also to working with all of you,” she says to appreciative laughter, “but I don’t think I’m the only one who’s had my eye on the welcome party spread since I got here."

As the crowd heads for the food, Dig, and Lyla amble up to me, grinning.

“How could you do this to me?” I demand.

“Do what?” Dig says evenly.

“My mom is my boss. My _mom_ is my _boss_.”

Lyla smiles. “I’d have thought you’d be used to it by now.”

“Oh, haha. You couldn’t have warned me?”

“And miss out on the look on your face?” Dig says.

Mom comes up behind me and slides an arm around my waist. “Come on. Back to the salt mines with you.”

“Don’t touch me, corporate fat cat.”

She drags me back into her welcome party, and I whine theatrically all afternoon.

I wait until we’re in the elevator heading home at the end of the day to tell her, “Congratulations, Mom.”

She links her arm through mine. “Thank you, sweetheart.” Her smile turns pained. “It’s not how I would’ve ever wanted it to happen.” She lets out a long sigh. “He would have been so good at this.”

With his sense of purpose? With the loyalty he inspired in people, because they knew damn well that he had their backs? The way he could sum up a situation in a few smartass remarks that put it all in perspective? Yeah, my uncle would have rocked at this.

“I was kind of looking forward to working with him,” I admit. “In the field we got to be a hell of a team. It would’ve been…” I swallow. “It would’ve been nice at my day job too, you know?”

She turns that pained smile on me. “I do know.”

I give her a jostle. “Guess we’ll have to make do with you.”

“You want to get mouthy with the woman signing your paycheck?”

For the seventeenth time, I groan, “Ugh. My mom is my boss.”

Mom laughs. The elevator doors open, and I walk her to her car.

At home, Aunt Thea is busy organizing the sixth annual Couture for the Cure gala to benefit St. Somebody or Other’s vital work giving cancer patients access to designer handbags, probably. She has papers spread out all over the dining room table, which makes Mom purse her lips.

“Jon,” Aunt Thea says without looking up, “if we open up the west wing of the Ogden, can we - ”

“It’s covered,” I assure her. Officially Lyla is in charge of security for the event, but she basically handed the reins to me and then sat back to see what I’d do with them. “Are you going to be here for dinner?”

Aunt Thea makes a noncommittal noise.

She only sort of lives here. She comes and goes, spending a week at her house, three days here, one there, two weeks here. It seems random, when she can’t stand the places where Uncle Roy’s presence is most obviously missing and when she can’t stand to be away.

“It’s just that Mom is the new President of Panoptic, and I bet she’s going to want to open some wine or something.”

Aunt Thea finally looks up from her pile of paper, and she turns her big brown eyes on Mom. “You said yes?”

Everybody knew before me. Fucking _everybody_.

Mom adjusts the drape of her coat over her arm. “Yeah, I did.”

Aunt Thea smiles, and it’s the smile I’ve seen on Dad and Laurel and even Mom sometimes, when the wrong name gets mentioned. She starts gathering up her pile of papers. “We’re going to need the Pontet Canet for this.”

Dad makes a point of coming home early - seven-thirty is early for him these days - and Abby dresses up as if we were going out for the evening. It’s damn good wine, and Aunt Thea is the first to offer a toast.

“To new beginnings,” she says.

I’ll drink to that.

  


 

Two days later, the first sharp autumn cold front moves into Starling, and my leg aches.

“Is this going to get better with time?” I ask Dad.

“Worse.”

“Oh. Okay. Thanks.”

After dinner we start combing through Belfort’s personal information, and we find credit card payments to an escort service called Finest Companions. I look up at Mom, sitting across the kitchen table from me. “That’s motive for his wife, isn’t it?”

“Doesn’t fit,” she says, reaching for her mug of chamomile tea. “You catch your husband hiring escorts without permission, you don’t announce to the world how evil he is and kill him in the flashiest way possible. You give him an air embolism with a hypodermic needle and collect the life insurance.”

Dad blinks at her. Then he leans in curiously. “Do you?”

Mom sips her tea. “Everyone knows that.”

“Of course. How stupid of me.”

“Now that we’ve established that,” I mutter, “can we talk about - hold on, without _permission_?”

Dad’s eyes flicker upward as if he’s tempted to roll them. “I couldn’t help but notice that Belfort was one of the earliest donors to the Chimera Institute,” he says, pushing his glassbook towards us. “Nowhere near the biggest, but without his money Cuvier’s project never would have gotten off the ground.”

Mom gathers the tax document off the screen to project it in front of her. “That’s one of dozens of organizations he was tied to.”

“It’s by far the most infamous. I wouldn’t be surprised if Belfort had gotten some death threats over it.” Dad’s expression darkens. “Thea did.”

Mom nods, pressing her lips together. “I’ll have a look.”

I glance at the time in the corner of the glassbook display. “Hey, uh, I’m late.”

Mom frowns at me. “For what?”

I get to my feet. “A thing.”

“Oh, well, if you have a thing,” she says archly, waving me away from the table. “Don’t let us keep you.”

If Tish were still staying with us, I’d have to explain myself, but since she moved into that efficiency apartment in June, I can just be on my way.

I text her: _Running a little late. See you in 15?_

_No worries. Ready when you are._

The day the cast came off, Tish was at our house to give Abby a voice lesson, and she caught me on the sofa with my pant hem pulled up to my knee, staring at my weirdly skinny lower leg and running my fingers over the pink and silver ridges of scars. I looked up when I heard her come in, swallowed hard, and forced a smile. “Damn shame. No more heels and short skirts for me.”

Tish sat down next to me. “The physical therapist said you need exercise to rebuild the muscle, right?”

I grimaced. “Everything that woman tells me to do turns out to be excruciating.”

“I know a way that’s so much fun you’ll hardly notice it hurts.”

That perked me right up.

She actually blushed. “Not _that_ , Jonathan.”

She took me dancing at Snug Harbor.

My high school offered ballroom and social dance. At fourteen, I noticed the male-to-female ratio in those classes, and I made one of the best investments of my life. Dance floors? I own them.

But when I led Tish onto the floor at Snug Harbor, I bumped into her three times in three minutes. Finally I figured out why: she responded to the slightest pressure of a lead. It was like taking a finely tuned race car out for the first time and faceplanting into the steering wheel because you don’t realize how sensitive the brakes are.

“You’re better at this than I am.”

She smiled. “I wasn’t going to say anything.”

When the sixties bubblegum pop turned to dirty blues, I found a girl who looked a lot like Elaine and who knew exactly what she was doing with her hips. I let her grind all over me until my bad leg started to wobble, and then I took a seat next to Tish.

She grinned at me. “Having fun?”

I grinned back, slumping low in my chair. “You have the best ideas.”

“I know.”

When we left a couple hours later, my lower leg cramped and burned, but my blood hummed happily with endorphins. As we stepped outside, I saw the flash of a reflection among the cars parked along the curb. It was a camera lens, perched on the roof of a little Camry with the photographer keeping his head down.

“Shit.” In the three years that I completely failed to land myself in jail or crash even one expensive vehicle, CelebCast and TMZ got bored with me. Then I got kidnapped and shot, which made me all kinds of interesting again. “Tish, keep to my left and walk close.”

Without asking why, she stepped right up to my elbow. I put two middle fingers in the air, and I didn’t put them down until I’d walked her to the passenger door and closed it behind her.

As we pulled away from the curb, she turned to me. “Please explain what you just did.”

“Gossip rags can’t run a photo with obscenity in it.”

Her eyes widened. “There was a photographer?”

“Not again, there won’t be.”

I don’t know what Mom does to paparazzi, exactly. I just know that when I tell her about them, they suddenly become very respectful of our privacy. No one has bothered us at Snug since, and at this point all the bartenders start mixing Tish’s favorite the moment they see us come through the door.

When I pull up in front of her apartment building, she comes down the front walk looking like some GI’s sweetheart in a World War II propaganda poster. It must be Throwback Night. When she climbs into my car, I tell her, “We could paint you on the nose of a B-17.”

I should probably keep thoughts like that to myself. It has not escaped my attention that Tish is beautiful, or that she has a nice rack, or that you could hang a sign off her ass that says Sponsored by Sir Mix-a-Lot. But if she were at all interested in me, sometime in the past six months she might have at least batted her eyelashes once or twice. Nope. Nothing.

“Thank you,” she says. “But I think I’d rather have a Navy destroyer named after me.”

I stomp on the brakes in my head. I stomp hard. But my mouth does not stop on a dime. “And be full of seamen?”

There is a long silence, in which I mentally recite every curse word I know.

“Jonathan,” she says in a choked voice. It is hard to tell in the dark car, but it’s a good bet she is blushing again. “I cannot believe you just said that.”

Then she covers her mouth with her hand, and her shoulders shake silently. Thank God.

At Snug Harbor, we show everyone up, at least until the band’s first set is over. I’m still working on a basket of cheese fries when the second begins, so I have no objections when somebody else asks Tish for a dance. I chat to the bartender and do a little recreational flirting with the thirty-something woman on the barstool next to me. All the while, my eyes scan the room, exit to exit.

So I notice when the sandy-haired guy gets obnoxious with Tish. Drunk and clumsy, he tries to pass off an ass-grab as an accident, and with stone cold politeness she bids him good night and turns to walk away.

“Hey, I’m sorry, honey,” he says, laughing and grabbing her wrist. “I was just playing around. I promise I’ll behave.”

He tugs her backward against his chest, gets an arm around her, and presses his face to the hollow of her neck. Breathes in, sways on his feet, rocking both of them sideways.

Something jolts in my gut. I’m on my feet, heart rate spiking. Joseph Risdon is _dead_ , but there he is in the middle of the dance floor with his nose in Tish’s hair. _There’s things I can do, won’t even leave a mark_.

I’m halfway to them before I know what I’m doing. I can peel that arm away from her waist and break it at the elbow. Left jab to the throat, and I’ll put him on the floor.

Tish catches sight of me, and her posture goes rigid. “Let go of me,” she commands. “Now.”

And he does. The guy steps back, and he’s just a drunk asshole in his twenties. Doesn’t look a thing like Risdon. His laughter turns condescending. “Fine. Relax, Jesus.”

Tish doesn’t even glance at him. She walks straight for me and reaches up for my shoulder, hand right over the ridge of scar tissue. “Are you okay?”

I take a deep breath. Aside from feeling completely ridiculous, “I’m fine.” I’m all revved up with nowhere to go, and in a second the adrenaline rush is going to turn to jitters.

Behind her, the sandy-haired guy scoffs at us. “A boyfriend. Of course.” He shakes his head. “Might want to keep her on a shorter leash, man.”

Wrong moment to say that to me. Wrong fucking moment. I make it half a pace before Tish steps into my path and splays both hands on my chest. “Hey, hey,” she says soothingly. “Why don’t we go get some air? Come on, come with me.”

She herds me to the exit. When the door swings closed behind us, we stand in the sudden quiet of the sidewalk at midnight, and I suck down cool air and get a fucking grip.

“I’d say there was no need to defend my honor,” Tish says, and licks her red lips, “but that looked like something else.”

I scratch the back of my neck. “He, um - with his face in your hair, for a second it looked like…” It sounds so stupid I can’t even string the words together.

I don’t have to. Her eyes soften. “Yeah, I can see how it would.”

Walk it off. No reason this should ruin the evening. “You want to go back inside? They haven’t played ‘Reet Petite’ yet, and you know they will.”

She loops her arm through mine. “Can we go for a drive?”

Yeah. We can do that.

On a winding stretch of Lakeshore Drive, she syncs her phone's playlist to my speakers and sings along to jazz standards. The night turns velvety and simple, and we roll down the windows and let the wind tear apart her forties hairstyle. When I pull up in front of her apartment building half an hour later and walk her to her door, the big curls are loose around her face.

“‘ _S wonderful_ ,” she sings to herself, “ _‘s marvelous, that you should care for me_.”

She accepts the hand I offer and twirls under my arm on the next step.

“ _'S awful nice. 'S paradise. 'S what I love to see_.” She spins to a stop right at her front door, coming back into closed position with me.

I can’t help smiling, and I can’t help reaching for her. Her eyes widen as my hand curves around her neck. Thumb on her pulse, I lean in to kiss her.

At the last second she draws in a sharp breath and presents her cheek to me.

Oh. Shit.

But now I’m an inch from her face, and the only thing more awkward than kissing her cheek would be not kissing her cheek. I give her a close-mouthed peck, and then I step back and slip my hands into my pockets. “Sorry.”

“Don’t be. It wasn’t, um.” She licks her lips. “It wasn’t unwelcome. But better not to go down that road, don’t you think?”

No, I most certainly do not. “Better how?”

She looks at the cement. “I don’t do casual, and it seems like you don’t do serious. That is a recipe for unpleasantness.”

I think she just called me a slut, and she is not exactly wrong. The longest relationship I ever had was the one with the fewest strings attached. A year of the best sex of my life, zero I love yous, and no hard feelings when she transferred to Tulane.

My one attempt at serious flamed out spectacularly when I slept with one of her Zeta sisters. I was blacked out at that party, and to this day I don’t remember how it happened. I just know the next morning one of my pledge brothers told me, laughing his ass off, “Yeah, man, she kind of dragged you upstairs. Julie is going to kill you.”

No kidding. When I told her, Jules started pounding her fists on my chest. I let her land a few hits - I figured she was entitled - until she took a swing at my face. Then I got her in a bear hug before she could break her hand, and I held her still until she calmed down enough to break up with me.

The rest is a matter of public record - for which I am eternally grateful, CelebCast.

But whatever else kissing Tish might be, it could never be casual. “You think I’m looking for a fling?”

She avoids my eyes. “What do we really have in common, except for the same nightmares?”

I suck in a slow breath, because where do I even start with this? “You know my family. You know about my night job. My little sister loves you. And you love her - which, by the way, is a thing we have in common that is not horrific nightmares. If all I wanted was a casual fuck, you’d be the last girl on the list.”

She lets out a little huff of laughter, chancing a glance up at me. “Aren’t you a sweet talker.”

“Tish. I don’t understand.”

“For a long time, it was just me and my father,” she says quietly. “Now it’s just me. Your family means a lot to me.”

I almost want to laugh at that. “No one’s going to shun you if this blows up in our faces. Ten to one, they take your side.”

“Jon, I just...” There’s that tight smile again. “I’m sorry.”

I want to point out all the reasons that none of this makes sense, but I hear Dig’s voice in my head. _Never argue with a woman’s feelings. Rookie mistake._

She tangles her fingers together nervously, and it occurs to me that she knows who really killed Joseph Risdon and how. Thirty seconds ago that guy was towering over her with his hand on her neck - not two hours after that creep at the bar had his hands all over her. I shove my hands deeper into my pockets. “Okay. Forget I tried anything.”

“I hope we can keep on like we have been.”

Let’s just be friends. That is what that means. I assume she’s not using those words because everyone knows they actually mean, Let’s awkwardly hang out, like, twice and then never speak again.

After all, I don't really see Elaine anymore, do I?

I swallow. “Like I said, just pretend I didn’t.”

“Okay.” She offers me a polite smile. “I had a wonderful time tonight. Thank you.”

“Good night.”

She hesitates with her hand on the doorknob, considering and reconsidering, and finally she goes up on her tiptoes to kiss my cheek like she has every night after Snug Harbor. I have to bend down a few inches for her to manage it. “Good night.”

I watch the door close behind her. I know from experience that this mule-kick-to-the-gut feeling is going to fade, but for the moment I'm careful easing myself into the driver's seat of the car. On the way home, I don’t catch a glimpse of the red lipstick print on my face until I turn onto Providence Street. I rub it away before I go inside.

Just to prove we’ve already forgotten and nothing at all has changed - almost-kiss? what almost-kiss? - the very next night we go to Snug again on definitely-not-a-date. I brace myself for awkward smiles and stilted small talk.

What actually happens is much weirder: we keep on like we have been. On the dance floor she follows my lead like a mind reader, and off it she laughs at my jokes even when she should probably smack me for them instead. When I drop her home, she leaves a lipstick print on my cheek.

I don’t know how to feel about this, which I guess is the next best thing to being totally cool with it.

That is, until my father chooses the very next morning to look up from his newsfeed and say, “I don't mean to tell you what to do, but your mother's feelings are a little hurt that you haven't told her you’re seeing someone.”

"That’s because I’m not."

He gives me a look over the rim of his coffee cup.

I put my mug down a little too hard. "Not that it is any of your business, but she turned me down, ok?"

He raises his eyebrows in faint surprise, then looks down at his newsfeed again with a murmured, "I'm sorry."

I poke my glass of orange juice, and it slides an inch or two in its own puddle of condensation. "Hey, probably would have fucked it up anyway. I have kind of a track record."

“Jon,” Dad says, meeting my eyes again. All I ever told him about how things ended with Julie was _got drunk, screwed up, she dumped me_. But he of all people knows what I'm talking about. “You don’t have to pay for your mistakes indefinitely. Not if you learn from them. And you already know how to do the hard parts: trust, loyalty, putting someone else’s needs before your own.” He turns his attention to his newsfeed again. “When you’re ready, you’re going to be just fine.”

I mop up egg yolk with my toast. “Or else the air embolism.”

“Well, yes.” The corners of his mouth twitch. “Everyone knows that.”

We go back to our glassbooks.


	2. Chapter 2

For reasons passing my understanding, I am invited to Mom’s first official meeting with Dig and Lyla to discuss the future of Panoptic. My mother with a new project is a force of nature. With a purposeful gleam in her eye, she talks expansion, opening offices in other cities, and offering new services.

“I know your first priority is going to be our infosec division,” Dig says.

“There’s so much potential, John! Your personal identification protection is strong, but there’s a whole corporate market that we could tap into.”

“We brought you in for a reason,” Lyla says, smiling.

“And your new managing director should free you up to handle more of that,” Dig says, looking right at me.

I stare at them. “My mother is promoting me? That looks a lot like nepotism.”

“Lyla and I promoted you,” Dig says.

“It was one of our last official decisions,” Lyla adds.

I look to Mom, who smiles and says, “They did. I just got stuck with you.”

That very afternoon, she starts piling new responsibilities on me. I’ll be taking point on cases - the buck stops with me - and I’ll be making the kinds of judgment calls that can mean life or death if the worst happens. Two dozen trained and experienced bodyguards answer to me now.

Not one of them complains about taking orders from Prince Pretty Boy. At first I assume this is because getting shot means all kinds of street cred in the private security world.

“We saw you in action at the inauguration,” Ramirez says, "and we tallied up how many of other people’s bones you broke.”

“You did what?”

“It was nine, if you're curious. Nice work at the mansion too."

My stomach does a lazy somersault. She could mean busting loose and fighting back until the Diggles arrived, as in the official story, or she could mean the dead guys with slashed arteries and crushed skulls. I lick my lips. "The hell is wrong with you people?"

“I’m saying we know what you’re made of, Queen.”

God, I hope not.

If I’m looking for forgiveness, the gates are closing on me pretty soon. I have never been nearly as good at either Judaism or Presbyterianism as Abby is. No bar mitzvah and no confirmation, and I have not set foot on holy ground since my uncle’s funeral at Christ the King. But if Mom doesn’t make it to synagogue any other day of the year, she makes it for Yom Kippur, and Abby invariably goes with her.

I am not a hundred percent convinced there is a God, and some days I think this nasty little world would be completely unforgivable if there were. When I killed three men, the judgment I feared wasn’t His. It wasn’t the law’s or my father’s - or at least, not as much as it would have been if I were smart.

On Friday evening, Mom and Abby stand on either side of me in crisp white, heads bowed. Muttering along with the Kol Nidrei, I look down at Abby. I figure if this kid thinks I am a decent human being, then I’m probably not going to hell.

But I can’t listen to the slow, mournful voice of the cantor without wondering what He would make of me.

“And for all these, God of forgiveness,” the congregation repeats the confession prayer, “forgive us, pardon us, and grant us atonement.”

I press my lips together. I showed up like I was supposed to, but I am not asking Him for anything. Not this year.

It’s weighing on somebody else though. Not two nights later, on the way to dinner, Abby turns down Styx’s “Renegade” on the radio and regards me neutrally. “Would you have killed him if he hadn’t made that threat?”

I keep my eyes on the road, and I take a deep breath before I answer her. “What, to murder my whole family?”

Fidgeting with the strap of her seatbelt, Abby waits for me to stop deliberately misunderstanding her.

I scratch the back of my head. “I was hoping you didn’t know what he meant.”

Looking deeply sorry for me, she says, “When are you going to figure out that I am not, in fact, an innocent flower unsullied by the nasty, nasty world?”

“Probably when we qualify for Medicare.”

I get a twitch of a smile, but she won’t let me off that easy.

I slide my hand down the steering wheel. Since the very first time Dad left me alone in a room with infant Abby with instructions to “watch your sister for a minute, Jonny,” I have known how this big brother thing is supposed to work. I’d do a lot for that kid. Anything that was right and a lot of things that were wrong.

But I can’t give her the answer she is waiting for. “Abigail, I honestly don’t know.”

She makes big sad eyes, exactly the way I have come to hate over the last few months.  “You said you’d pay for my squishy pink heart.”

“Yeah, well. Tonight I’m just paying for dinner. French or Italian - pick one.”

Late that night at the lair, Mom nods along while I beat the shit out of a training dummy and tell her about the big sad eyes. “She keeps looking at me like… like she doesn’t recognize me anymore.”

Mom gives me the same pitying look Abby gave me just hours ago. “Is that what you think this is about?”

I lean against an arm of the dummy, panting. “Well, it was until you said that with that look on your face.”

Mom sits back in her chair, folding her arms. “She’s afraid she doesn’t measure up.”

“To what?”

“To you, sweetheart,” Mom says patiently.

I was getting detentions on the regular before she could tie her shoes. There has never been a time when I was held up as a role model.

“One of these days you’re going to have to get over this black sheep of the family complex. You haven’t been that kid for quite a while.”

“Right. Now I’m the lunatic in the Halloween costume who once committed voluntary manslaughter.”

Mom sighs. “Abby did notice when you took a bullet for her. She was present with functioning ears when you told Risdon to hurt you instead of her. Is it really so weird that you’re her hero?”

I know what heroes look like. They are the people who choose - consciously _choose_ \- to stand up against the evil in the world, knowing full well what it might cost them and expecting nothing in return. “Mom, that wasn’t hero stuff.” There was no decision-making involved in jumping on Abby, and it wasn’t some act of selflessness. “That was just family.”

The Arrow’s phone rings, and I put McKenna Hall on speaker.

“We’ve got another one,” she says heavily. “Psalm 94:1.”

Mom pulls up the verse on Mary’s screen. _The LORD is a God who avenges. O God who avenges, shine forth._

Half an hour later, I swing onto the fire escape of the trendy renovated Warehouse District office where the Chimera Institute’s fundraising staff spent their days. Blue lights flash in the street below, and in the office suite itself, shapes in blue windbreakers with SCPD on the back bend to take photos and samples.

Hall stands a few feet away from me at the window, and when she sees me, she waves them off. “Get those to Garcia.” Then she pops the window for me.

I have never seen so much blood in my life.

When I swing over the ledge, I run into the smell like it’s a brick wall. The metallic tang is so strong I can nearly taste it, and the sourness of rotting organic matter turns my stomach. There is nothing in the entire loft-style office but the forensic team’s work lights, a lake of red, and two hunched shapes lit up bright.

Those coats were probably white when they walked in here. The two figures kneel with their hands bound behind them. Several yards in front of them rest their heads, one facedown and one face-up.

“There’s a bucket, if you need to hurl,” Hall says politely. “The blood spatter guy did, so no judgment.”

I clear my throat, which comes out sounding more like a nauseated grunt.

“Dr. Soraya Miller and her husband Dr. George Friedman,” Hall says, skirting the blood puddle and standing over the blood-matted mass of black hair that obscures Dr. Miller’s face.

“What are they doing here? This office has been vacant for six months.”

“They were Abel Cuvier’s co-workers at the Chimera Institute,” Hall says, sliding her hands into her pockets and stepping over to Dr. Friedman’s head. He stares up at the ceiling, mouth open in a last protest. “My nerds are all heartbroken. Apparently some of the doctor’s most incredible breakthroughs couldn’t have been made without their help.”

My eyes swing over to the exposed brick wall at the far end of the office, where chapter and verse are smeared in blood. “I guess we know what was so evil.”

She sighs. “I guess we do.”

 

The corner office at Panoptic that once belonged to Lyla looks odd with vintage movie posters on the wall instead of vintage firearms. Mom has also brought in a couple of houseplants to make the place more homey, and I sit in one of the two chairs in front of her desk and watch her place and replace the fern.

“So this is about CI and genetics research,” I say.

“Looks that way.” Mom crosses her arms at the fern on the bookshelf, and she takes it down and carries it over to the sideboard.

“So we’re thinking an axe or a sword? You don’t just walk around with something like that. It’d be a bitch to hide.”

“It’s not a first-time killer’s weapon, either.”

“The kind of strength you need to hack through vertebrae and muscle and tendon in one stroke?”

Mom hums agreement. “Not your typical poisoner.”

I slump down low in the chair in front of her desk. “Does forensics have anything on him?”

Mom scoots the fern a few inches to the left, nods at it, and turns to me. “Not a fingerprint or a hair or even a bootprint in all that blood. No neighbors or co-workers or friends noticed anything strange in the days before the murders. The locks weren’t forced. Picked, maybe, but if they were, it was by a master. The mechanisms weren’t even scratched.”

“You’re saying we’ve got nothing on him.”

“That is what I’m saying.”

“So we do this from the other end. Identify likely victims, keep an eye on them.”

“Ok, let’s start with - ”

A knock on Mom’s door frame interrupts her. I don’t bother looking up until her face brightens and she says, “Terry.” Then her brow furrows. “Honey, what happened?”

I turn. McGinnis leans in the doorway, and from wrist to elbow an ugly gray EMG cast encases his arm. “I’m fine, Mrs. Queen. Just an overuse injury.”

I’m about to stand, but then he glances at me, and I keep my seat. Mom’s moving in on him anyway. One corner of my mouth twitches upward. “The hell are you doing here?”

“Wayne says I might want some cartilage in my wrists when I’m forty. He flew me out to see a specialist. The office is two blocks over, so I thought I’d say hi.”

Mom stands on tiptoe to kiss his cheek. “You’re coming to dinner tonight then, right?”

“Wouldn’t miss it.” Then he glances at me again. “You going out tonight?”

Experimentally, I say, “I don't need a wingman who can't keep up.”

He raises an eyebrow at me. I wait for him to snap back with something about how my sorry ass needs all the help I can get.

The last time I saw McGinnis in person, he was staring at me in the hallway of the old Queen mansion, and I was covered in Joseph Risdon’s blood. In the six months since, he has been… _polite_ to me. At first I assumed he was going easy on the guy who’d just gotten shot, which was weird enough. But just last month he called me to exchange intel on a case, and when I called him a douchenozzle, all he said was, “Ok, just call me when you’ve got something.”

Right now all he says is, “Yeah, I’ve got doctor's orders.”

Fine. Whatever.

McGinnis sticks around long enough to congratulate Mom on her new job, and for Mom to perform a friendly interrogation - “How does Matt like Gotham U? He’s a sophomore now, right?” and “I heard Bruce had been in the hospital. How is his recovery going?”

Ten minutes later, McGinnis begs off to leave for his appointment. “I’ll see you for dinner.”

When he’s gone, Mom and I pull up a list of Chimera Institute fellows and donors, and she blows air through her teeth. “You take the first hundred pages, and I’ll take the second?”

I rub my hands together. “Let’s do the thing.”

 

Mom and I are the last to arrive to the dinner table that night, and there are exactly two place settings empty. One is her customary chair at the foot of the table, and the other is right between Abby and Tish. The girls are laughing at something McGinnis just said, but they look up when we come in.

“Would you come sit so we can start?” Abby says when I come up behind them, pushing out my chair for me. “I’m starving.”

I can feel Dad’s eyes on me as Tish and I exchange hellos. It's not weird, okay? Stop staring.

As Milena bring out serving dishes, the conversation resumes, and apparently they’ve been talking current events. Aunt Thea pours herself another glass of water and says, “Yes, let’s kill off the evil, evil VSG researchers who want to do horrible things like cure cancer.”

“I imagine the killer would call that ‘playing God,’” Dad says.

“He must be insane,” Abby says.

“Not necessarily,” Tish says quietly. “There’s a certain kind of man who is exquisitely concerned for humanity, but looks right through individual people. He’s perfectly sane. He just,” she gives a graceful, one-shouldered shrug, “sees the bigger picture.”

Dad tips his head at her. Back in the day, he made kind of a habit of getting stabbed through the lung by exactly that kind of man. “He thinks he’s doing the world a service.”

Aunt Thea reaches for the roasted potatoes. “Maybe he was, a bit,” she says darkly. “I knew Belfort from fundraisers and things, and let me tell you, he was no angel.”

I frown at her. “I don’t see how that matters.”

McGinnis raises an eyebrow. “You don’t? Because I kind of thought you’d decided killing people was fine if they really, really, _really_ had it coming.”

Dead silence.

Everyone except Dad stares at their plates. He watches me with a carefully agnostic expression.

“You want to do this now?” My blood heats, and my voice shakes with anger. “In front of my family?”

McGinnis’ shoulders set. “We can take it outside.”

We get to our feet, chairs screeching backward on the wood floor. I realize there’s a dinner knife clenched in my hand, and I put it down. In unison, we move to go.

“Stop right there.”

Surprise roots us to the floor.

Abby stands across from McGinnis, palms planted on the table, eyes blazing. “You want to call my brother a murderer? Use the word, Terry.”

McGinnis stares at her, mouth slightly open. I feel a flicker of sympathy, because I know exactly how weird it is to look at the space my baby sister is supposed to occupy and find a young woman standing there instead. But it’s a flicker competing with a furnace. I want to breathe fire at him, melt his face off, roast him to a cinder.

I have no idea if it’s because I think he’s wrong or because I think he’s right.

“If that’s what you think of him,” Abby continues, straightening up, fists balling at her sides, “you don’t have to share a dinner table with him.” She gestures to the hall and the front door beyond.

McGinnis looks at the floor. Looks at me. He rubs the back of his neck and says, “Excuse me for a minute.”

Half the table watches him go out the French doors and into the yard, and the other half appears to be fascinated with the centerpiece.

Tish’s hand covers mine on the back of my chair. _Sit down_ , her eyes say.

I turn my hand over beneath her fingers and give them a grateful squeeze. Then I follow McGinnis outside, shoving my hands in my pockets as I cross the veranda. I can’t punch him in the face with my hands in my pockets.

I find him balanced on the hammock, dragging one heel in the dirt. “I don’t think you’re a murderer,” he tells the ground.

The red-hot anger dims, and though my blood is still simmering, it probably won’t boil over. I lean against the oak tree, and the bark is rough even through my sleeve. “Legally speaking, it was probably voluntary manslaughter.”

He squints at the house, and I see the weirdest hurt in his face. “We had a code, man.”

“We still do.”

“Break it for a good reason, and someday you’ll break it for a bad one.”

“That’s Wayne talking,” I accuse.

“Yeah, and the old man knows his shit,” McGinnis says, getting to his feet and bracing his hand against a low-hanging branch. “As soon as we start deciding who deserves to live and who deserves to die, we are exactly what that psycho with the strychnine is. The rest is just…” he shakes his head. “Haggling over the price.”

I shove my hands deeper into my pockets. “Maybe so.”

“I mean, I get it. I do.” He kicks a tree root. “If it were my mom and Matt, I don’t know that I’d have done it any different.” More quietly, he says, “Maybe that’s what freaks me out about the whole thing.”

I shift against the oak trunk, let my head fall back against it. Heave a deep breath. “If you go dark side, I swear I will put an arrow in you.”

Finally, he looks over at me. “Yeah?”

“Non-lethal. Probably.”

The corner of his mouth twitches. “If you go dark side, I swear I will beat the shit out of you. Non-lethally. Probably.”

“Yeah, you’d better.”

“How are we going to know we’ve crossed the line?”

“I figure when we stop asking where it is, that’ll be a big fucking clue.”

Silently, he holds out his hand to me, and I amble over, pulling my hands from my pockets. Then I take a swing at him.

He dodges it, moves smoothly into a right straight, and nearly tags me in the ribs. A smile spreads across his face. “You’re going to punch the guy with the arm brace?”

“If he really, really, really has it coming.” I bear him to the ground in a flying tackle, and though he tries to use my momentum against me, I still come up on top.

“Get off me, asshole.” He nearly manages an armlock, and when I slip it he heaves me off of him. “Shit, you’re heavy.”

“One hurt wrist, and you forget what a guard is. What a fucking disgrace.”

We grapple at the foot of the oak tree until we’re both dirty and sweaty and covered in grass stains. Nobody wins, and nobody loses.

Twenty minutes later, we go back inside.

 

When I suit up that night, I head downtown and pay a visit to McKenna Hall at her spacious new Captain’s office. I climb onto her fire escape and tap her window until she pops it open.

“I hope you have something for me,” she says.

“That’s funny,” I say, leaning through the window, “I was hoping you had something for me.”

She sighs.

Footsteps pound outside the door, and she reflexively puts her hand on top of the hood and shoves me back outside. I slip out onto the fire escape again, window cracked behind me.

A detective with his tie askew bursts into the office. “Chief, we got another one.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Another CI geneticist dead at his house in the fifth ward. Ky Tran. Looks like strychnine again.  More Bible on the walls too.”

“Time of death?”

“Maybe an hour ago.”

“God damn it. Get me Collins. Now.”

“Watchtower, are you hearing this?” I mutter into my comm.

“Yes,” Mom says, tense but controlled. “CI was led by a team of five. I’m hunting down cell numbers for the other two so I can ping their locations. Give me two seconds.”

“Garcia,” Hall barks into her phone. “Next likely targets, now.”

“Maria Artigas and Jerome Watkins,” Mom says, and I slip back inside and supply the names to Hall.

“How - ?” She gives herself a little shake. “Do you have their locations?”

“Now we do! Terpsichore and Sixteenth, Twelfth and Friars,” Mom says, and I pass that along too.

“I’m going for Artigas,” I say, and Hall nods sharply.

Mom says, “Don’t even bother with the bike, you’re - ”

I take a swan dive off the fire escape, firing a grappling hook on the way down.

“ - already leaping halfway to your death,” Mom mutters. “I was going to say zipline it, but no, go ahead, please give me heart palpitations.”

One long, stomach-swooping swing, and I’m three streets east, tumbling onto a gravelly rooftop. I roll to my feet, grappling hook zipping back into its chamber at my side, and I run hard for the alley.

“Narrow it down, Watchtower!” Two seconds later I leap the gap to the next rooftop, and in ten more steps I’m looking out over Terpsichore. “Come on, help me out here.”

“East side of the apartment building,” Mom says, and I juke left. “Fourth floor, three windows from the north wall.”

The grappling hook buries itself deep in the fake stucco, and I rappel down the outer wall. Shove off hard next to Maria Artigas’ window, plow through the glass and hit the carpet in a roll.

A middle-aged woman lies twitching on the floor by her dining room table, back arched painfully, limbs twisted. Her dark hair falls across her face, and her glasses lay smashed a few feet away from her.

“Dr. Artigas?” I crawl across the carpet toward her.

Her breath comes in tiny, shallow catches.

I push her hair back, and the muscles of her face have contorted into an agonized rictus, teeth bared and eyes squeezed tight shut.

“Watchtower,” I mutter. “911.”

“On their way,” Mom says quietly.

“Maria?” I check her pulse, and it’s weak and thready. I scoot around behind her, and because I’m otherwise useless here, I gather her up, as if holding her still can stop the convulsions. “Hey. I’ve got you.”

I don’t know if she hears me. On the wall to my left the words are carved: Exodus 21:24.

“Help is coming, ok?”

She doesn’t answer that either. The exhausted wheezes shallow out to nearly nothing.

I sit on the floor of her apartment, and I wait for EMS, pressing two fingers to her pulse every now and then. After a minute and a half, she goes still and quiet in my arms.

“Arrow?” Mom whispers. “How is she?”

I stopped feeling a pulse three tries ago. “When are they going to get here?”

Mom sighs, quiet and knowing. “Any moment now. You can’t be there when they come through the door.”

I press my fingers to Maria Artigas’ neck one last time. Lay her down gently, hair tucked away from her face. Then I leave the way I came.

Ten minutes later, I retrieve my bike from the alley where I left it.

“Two officers were injured trying to apprehend a man fleeing the residence of Jerome Watkins,” Mom says in my ear as I lean the bike through the roundabout at the foot of Nuxalk. “They described a man of average height, dressed all in black with the lower half of his face obscured. Thirties, maybe.”

“I take it Watkins is dead too?” I say flatly.

“Beheaded, like the two at the office.”

“Why poison some and behead others?”

“Honey, I don’t know,” Mom says wearily. “It’s nearly three. Just come home, ok?”

“On my way.”

She meets me at the front door, and she squeezes me tight. “I’m so sorry tonight ended like this.”

I let my head fall forward. In heels, she’s tall enough for me to headbutt her shoulder. “Hey,” I mutter into her polka dot shirt, “this is the job, right? Sometimes we lose.”

She finger-combs my hair where the motorcycle helmet must have left it sticking up. “Why don’t we go to the kitchen? There are strawberries and Cool Whip.”

I straighten up, shaking my head. “I’m going to bed.”

She grabs my wrist. “Jonny.”

“Mom.”

She sighs, and she lets me go.

Upstairs I toss and turn for a long time, waiting for the cramps in my bad leg to ease. When I dream, it’s of blood-matted hair and bared teeth gleaming in the darkness.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Abby's struggles with depression are depicted as realistically as I could manage in this chapter. They're very personal for me, as I imagine they will be for plenty of readers. I don't want to blindside anybody.

Mayor Queen and Chief Hall spend most of the next morning on camera, fielding questions from reporters and reassuring everyone that the serial murders are under thorough, competent investigation by the city’s finest. Mom and I watch on the big screen in the conference room at Panoptic.

“Given the department’s manpower crunch since your recent layoffs,” says the Star Herald’s most obnoxious representative, Jolie Page, “will you be relying on the Arrow’s help?”

“No, Ms. Page,” Hall says blandly, “the vigilante has not been issued a deputy’s badge.”

Page turns to Dad, who says only, “I can’t condone working outside the law.”

In the chair next to me, Mom tips her head at him fondly. “Oh, Oliver.”

“After the riots at the Bioethics Conference, many called the Arrow a hero,” Page presses Dad. “Is it true that you’ve given SCPD standing orders to bring him in?”

Dad’s expression hardly changes. “If the opportunity arises.”

“Do you believe your administration will succeed in that where so many others have failed?”

“I’d be a fool to make the Hood a priority while there are far more dangerous threats out there.”

“Like a serial killer who leaves chapter and verse at the scenes of his murders,” Page says, watching Hall’s expression intently and just barely refraining from a satisfied smile when a muscle jumps next to the Chief’s nose. “Does SCPD believe that these murders are religiously motivated? All of the victims so far are linked in some way to the Chimera Institute, which was condemned by faith groups the world over.”

“We believe these murders are the work of one very disturbed individual,” Hall says with finality.

“Well, this is clickbait,” Mom mutters. “Tasty, tasty clickbait.”

By afternoon, the national media has picked up the story. There is a whackjob with a Bible hunting the mad scientist’s buddies in Starling, and a sizable minority of the public thinks he’s got the right idea. Death to those who do what is abominable in the eyes of the Lord or whatever.

By six pm, every rag on the internet is calling our murderer the Archangel.

“Thank you, Ms. Page, that was helpful,” Mom mutters in her office at Panoptic, leaning far back in her desk chair and letting Mary’s holo scroll overhead.

On her office wall’s vidchat, Dad says, “McKenna’s furious about the leak.”

“I know she’s only had six months to weed out the leftover asshats in the department,” I say, leaning against Mom’s door jamb, “but can she do it any faster?”

“There are rules, Jon,” Dad sighs, rubbing his temple. I guess he would know. He’s been cleaning house at City Hall for just as long, and at present he’s facing five different wrongful termination suits. The last time I asked him about it, all he would say on the subject was, “I didn’t want a second term that badly anyway.”

“So what do we know?” Mom says, sitting up and laying her palms flat on her desk. “What’s this guy’s next move?”

“It’s not just CI he’s targeting, it’s Cuvier himself,” Dad says. “The scientists who worked more closely with him died in agony over several hours, while the others were killed relatively quickly and painlessly.”

“But Belfort only donated startup money, and he died slow too,” I point out.

Dad grimaces, and he glances between me and Mom. “Someone should talk to Thea about taking a few precautions.”

I raise an eyebrow. Then I put my index finger on my nose. A fraction of a second later, Mom follows suit.

Dad narrows his eyes at us. “Really?”

“I’m not about to tell Aunt Thea what’s good for her,” I say, at the same time Mom says, “She’s your sister.”

He raises one eyebrow at us.

“It gets worse,” Mom says, getting to her feet and coming around to stand in front of her desk. “This could mean very bad things for Couture for the Cure. A benefit for genetics research? A little strychnine in the shrimp pasta, and our killer bowls a strike.” Then she leans toward me. “That’s what it’s called, right? Bowling a strike? I’ve only bowled on a Wii.”

“On a what?”

“Ok,” Dad interrupts, raising two fingers to swipe away the call. His irritable look flickers from Mom to me and back. “Thank you for all your help.”

Mom sits on her desk and swings her ballet flats a few inches above the floor. “Welcome.”

He waves us off. “See you at home.”

“Whenever that is,” I grumble, shoving off the doorframe to walk over to her. “I doubt we’re getting out of here before nine.”

She cocks her head. “How many new client queries?”

“Oh, just everyone in Starling who donated so much as five dollars to Chimera.”

She hops off her desk. “Better get started, then.”

We leave Panoptic a little after nine, and on the bike I beat Mom home as usual. When I come through the back door, the whole kitchen smells of an odd combination of citrus and the cleaner Milena is using to wipe down the counters.

“There is dinner left over if you are hungry, Mr. Jonathan.”

“No, thanks, I ate.”

“Hey, Jonny,” Elaine says from the kitchen table.

“Oh, hey. How have you been?”

She and Abby sit across from each other with a fruit bowl between them, and orange and banana peels litter the whole table. A suture kit lies open at Abby’s left elbow, and when I lean in closer I see rows of neat stitches holding together the torn peels in front of Elaine.

“There’s been a massacre,” she explains. “We’re doing all we can.”

Abby holds up one of her attempts, and it is frankly terrifying.

“Your mattress stitch was better,” Elaine says. “But you’re getting the hang of it.”

I raise my eyebrows at Elaine, who hasn’t been down in the lair once in the six months since she quit the team. “I thought you weren’t a fan of do it yourself medicine.”

She looks away from me, and her smile slips. Then she screws it back on and nods at Abby. “Can you say no to those puppy eyes?”

“No idea.” I wink at Abby. “She knows better than to try that crap with me.”

Elaine laughs for real, and the tension goes out of her shoulders. She pulls out the chair next to her. “So how are you liking the new president?”

I sink into it, shaking my head. “You knew ahead of time, didn’t you?”

Elaine scoops peels toward her, clearing table space for my elbows. “I think Mom misses all the cloak and dagger from the good old days. Now she’s just keeping secrets for the fun of it.”

“They’re not really retiring, are they? They’re going to Kandahar to be spies or some shit.”

“Can’t rule it out.” She reaches across the table and repositions Abby’s hands. “I’m planning their going away party for the twenty-first of next month. There’ll be a live band, and Vincent’s is catering.” She gives me a teasing, sideways glance. “You’re welcome to bring a date.”

Abby’s frown of concentration disappears, and she looks up at me. In my peripheral vision, I catch Milena looking over her shoulder at us.

Elaine smiles. “What’s this I hear about you and a redhead of our acquaintance?”

I press my lips together and look away.

“Oh.” Elaine winces. “I’ve put my foot in it, haven’t I?”

Abby’s face falls, “But I thought you were - ”

“You thought wrong.” And you have a big mouth, kid. I get to my feet, chair squeaking on the wood floor. “I’m going to get changed. Lanie, you staying the night?”

She shakes her head, still looking contrite. “Jodie’s expecting me home.”

That’s right, some of us have girlfriends. “Tell her hi for me.”

I grump away upstairs.

Aunt Thea is the last to get home, and Dad waits until Abby has gone to bed to ask Aunt Thea: “Would you be willing to contact Panoptic about a - ”

“I wondered when you were going to bring this up,” she says, sitting back in her chair and sliding her wine glass toward her.

“After what happened to Belfort, I don’t think I’m overreacting.”

“I will think about it,” she says firmly.

He is silent for a long few moments before he says, “Have you considered postponing the gala? Just until we’ve caught the killer.”

She just looks back at him steadily, long enough that I’m really glad I got my finger on my nose as fast as I did. “No,” she says at last. “I have not.”

Dad’s eyes flicker upward. “Thea,” he says patiently, “you are providing a target-rich environment for a serial killer. One who works with poison.”

“And your solution is to give him exactly what he wants and prove to the world that murder is actually a fantastic strategy for shutting people up.” Aunt Thea gestures with her wine glass. “I’ve gotten a dozen RSVPs from people who won’t risk showing up, but I’ve gotten twice as many from people who believe supporting this research is more important than ever.”

Dad’s mouth twitches. He’s not sure he wants to say what he’s about to say.

Aunt Thea crosses her arms. “I thought you had policies about negotiating with terrorists, Ollie.”

Dad goes for it: “I can shut you down.”

Disgusted but not terribly surprised, my aunt tips back the last of her wine. “Do what you think you have to, Mayor Queen.”

  
  


Dad doesn’t shut her down.

Panoptic spends three days beefing up security measures for the event, going over the guest list and planning for contingencies like, for instance, a psycho with a large-ish edged weapon showing up to chop people’s heads off.

“If that happens, do not engage him on your own,” I tell my half dozen gathered security guards an hour before the doors open at the Ogden Museum.

Jones pats the Glock tucked into his shoulder rig. “Can I engage him with Vera?”

Dad sometimes does this thing where his expression goes utterly still, he blinks hard as if praying for patience, and then his eyes open and they are _glaring right at you_. It shuts people up faster than slapping duct tape on their faces.

Since I took this job, I’ve practiced that look in the mirror. This is the first time I’ve tried to use it on anybody.

Jones shuts up.

I have to work really hard to keep a straight face so I don’t ruin it.

Aunt Thea arrives for last-minute orders and inspections wearing a weird, high-collared ballgown that is probably at the bleeding edge of fashion. Her forearm crutches and cane are nowhere in sight, and the heavy, liquid-looking material of her dress sways on every step and makes her uneven gait impossible not to notice.

When Dad shows up, he starts shadowing her like a collie stalking the last sheep on earth, which she regards with a mixture of annoyance and affection. “Ollie, I have security cameras, trained professionals, and a handgun strapped to my leg. I don’t need a chaperone.”

“How about a date for the evening?” he says mildly.

She narrows her eyes at him. “You’ll pout if I turn you down.”

Without any other change to his sober expression, Dad sticks out his lower lip. Aunt Thea laughs and acquiesces.

Mom and I take up a post at the rear where we can see the whole room, and she balances Mary on her arm to keep track of security cameras. When the fashion show portion of the evening begins, I admit to being slightly distracted, because models.

The first woman comes down the runway in a swishy, flowy dress, and she looks a million feet tall and slightly pissed off by this roomful of her inferiors. Hot. Something shiny flashes among the layers of the skirt on every other step. It’s not until she stops to strike a pose, knee turned out to show off the thigh-high slit, that I realize her leg is biomechatronic from the knee down.

I can’t help glancing down at my left shin and flexing the foot slightly. That was almost me, if the bone had splintered differently or the bullet had been a slightly higher caliber.

Mom sees where I’m looking, and she murmurs, “You wouldn’t have looked half as good in that dress, though.”

“That’s a fact,” I mutter back.

The next woman uses an upright electric wheelchair. The one after that is missing an arm at the elbow. Every single one of the models is both drop dead gorgeous and disabled in some way.

I catch Aunt Thea’s eye, and she toasts me with her glass of champagne.

As the evening wears on and the auction begins, things mostly run smoothly for us. A camera fritzes out at the east door, but Jones has eyes on that entrance and gets it fixed in under thirty seconds. Ramirez turns away two attempted gatecrashers and Selby forcibly removes a woman who has had a little too much. Stay classy, elites.

At ten-thirty, I notice Aunt Thea learning hard on Dad’s arm. At eleven-fifteen, in the middle of the silent auction, she summons me with a look and quietly asks me to bring her cane from the coat check.

I’ve just dropped it off with her when I hear Ramirez over the comm. “Mr. Queen,” she says calmly, “I think there’s someone in the trees out here.”

Her rounds take her through the sculpture garden, which has been nearly empty all night given the chilly weather. Aunt Thea had a hundred paper lanterns hung in the myrtlewoods, and if someone’s skulking around, they’re not doing it in the lit-up branches. “In the oaks on the southeast corner?”

“The ones overhanging the fence, yes.”

“Jones?” I prompt.

“Backing her up, boss.”

I’m on my way too, sidestepping a woman’s trailing dress, as Ramirez tells Jones, “You see? The shadow on the third big branch from the bottom.”

“Is that a - holy shit!” Jones yells.

I take off running.

My breath frosts on my first step out into the night. I get to the garden just in time to see Ramirez hustling state senator Gutierrez and his husband to cover behind a life-size statue of the Three Graces. A gleaming knife lodges in Ramirez’s back, but she’s moving too freely for it to have pierced her body armor. She is muttering to both men: “Stay calm and stay down, ok?”

Gutierrez gestures to the knife hilt. “There’s a…”

“Yes, sir, I’m aware.”

A figure all in black darts through the oak copse, and metal gleams in his hand. Then he disappears among the ten-foot hedges at the east end of the garden. Holy shit, he made that knife throw from forty feet away.

Jones skirts the edge of the hedge maze, Vera drawn at his side.

“Ramirez, get them inside,” I say, drawing my Colt 1911 and falling into sync with Jones to cover her retreat to the building. “Anybody else out here?”

On the comms, Mom says, “Garden’s clear. SCPD is on their way. Can you see out there? Here, let me help.”

Mom floods the garden with light, and the next second a dark shape falls right onto my back.

Jones rips the guy off me the second before his knife can slide up into the gap in my kevlar. They tumble aside, and Jones ends up pinned underneath a figure shrouded in dull black leather, hooded and masked. The psycho’s nearly got a wrist lock when I kick him in the head. Or at least, that’s the plan. What actually happens is a sudden, iron grip on my ankle that wrenches me off balance.

Fucker’s fast.

In the second it takes me to get my feet under me again, the faceless bastard lands a sharp blackjack blow to the back of Jones’ head, and then he’s up and scrambling away. He’s not running for an exit, not running to scale the fence. He’s running for the building.

Mom is already giving orders on the comm, calling in Selby and Chacko and the others.

“Jones!” I bark.

He rolls over, dazed. “Fine. ‘M fine.”

I take off running after the man in black, who’s got a twenty yard lead on me. I gain on him fast - he seems to have an oddly low center of gravity and a short stride - and I’m coming up close when he reaches the Ogden’s east wall of swirl-patterned stucco. Without even slowing, he scales a decorative pillar like a goddamn squirrel.

Aw, shit, I’ve got to do this in a suit. I strip off the jacket and toss it aside.

Eyes up and ahead as I follow him, I spot the third floor balcony he must be heading for. If he can slip in there, he’s got the whole maze-like building to hide in, and there are upwards of four hundred human shields and possible targets in there. If a single one of them gets hurt on my watch…

Jesus, is this what Dad feels like all the time?

I catch the man in black on the balcony, and I tackle him to the terra cotta tile. Or, once again, that’s the theory. Somehow he dances out of my grip, and how the hell did he even do that?

This time he turns on me, and with each hand he draws an artsy-fartsy curved knife with a guardless hilt. One of them nearly slices into my neck before I get my guard up. Then there is no time for thought - just action and reaction as he slashes at me. He picked up on my bad leg about five seconds into this fight, and he’s trying to force me back onto it. I’m all straight lines, efficiency, hard-and-fast, and he’s wisping around me like a candle flame I’m flicking my finger through. The longer I keep doing it, the better odds I’ll get burned.

I’ve been throwing punches since I was eight. Most of the people who give me trouble are either significantly bigger than I am, significantly more berserk, or they’ve brought their friends.

This guy is an artist. It’s like fighting Sara or Dad. He anticipates me so well it’s creepy, and even when I catch him by surprise his form never falters.

Time to throw him off balance. I knock his hood off and rip down his mask –

Her mask.

Oh, I hate when that happens.

Evil knows no gender, and some women are sociopathic criminal scumbags who need their asses kicked. But between my mother’s feminism and my father’s weirdly stubborn chivalry, I grew up believing that a man who smacks women around is basically an unusually tall slime mold. Every time someone with boobs tries to take my head off, I have to flip the switch from Woman: Do Not Hit to Bad Guy: Apply Face to Floor.

I hesitate for barely an instant, but that is plenty enough time for her to dart into my space and sweep my leg out from under me. I stumble back, and her boot slams into my chest. She sends me tumbling over the edge of the balcony.

I’m not afraid of heights, but I am afraid of _falling_. Screaming panic rises in my chest in the endless 1.5 seconds while my arms scramble for purchase. I catch myself at the last second with a horrible, painful jolt, and - oh, fuck - I feel the searing tug and then the pop of sutures tearing loose in my forearm.

The woman rears back to stamp on my fingers wrapped around the columns of the railing.

“Freeze!” someone says.

Between the woman’s calves, I see Selby and Chacko drawing on her.

She doesn’t even look over her shoulder. Instead she leaps right over me, latches onto that decorative pillar again, and shimmies down it in two seconds flat. Then she’s darting away over the fence, disappearing into the darkness just as SCPD's blue flashing lights pull up.

“Queen, you okay?” Chacko says, reaching over the railing for me and doing a terrible job of giving me a hand up.

“Okay, tugging on my shirt is not actually helping,” I grumble as I clamber back onto the balcony.

“You’re really heavy. Think of it as moral support,” she says, smoothing my collar back down. “And, um. You’re bleeding.”

I inspect the spreading bloodstain on my shirtsleeve. “Yeah. I’m bleeding. Come on, let’s find my jacket and go talk to the cops.”

Twenty minutes later, I sit next to Jones at the tailgate of an ambulance while the nice EMT shines lights in his eyes. My dark jacket hides my bloody arm fairly well, so they can’t come at me with antiseptic wipes, ask awkward questions about whose sutures I just popped, or badger me to go to an emergency room.

McKenna Hall hovers nearby with her hands on her hips. “And then what happened?”

“And then Queen chased her down by himself exactly like he told all of us not to do,” Jones supplies.

She turns to me, and it’s weird to see concern on her face. She never looks at the Arrow like that. “You’re lucky you weren’t killed, Jon.”

Oh, come on. I’m not the ten-year-old who once spilled hot chocolate all over your white dress at a Christmas party. Now people trust me with shit. “This is my job, Chief.”

The concern doesn’t fade, but she nods and says, “Tell me everything you can about the attacker.”

I give her everything I can remember, and I assume she plans to pass it all along to the Arrow later. That’ll be good for a laugh, at least.

The weirdest thing about tonight is that Aunt Thea managed to keep the attack so quiet, the party is practically undisturbed. Except for a few people gawking at the emergency vehicles and asking if there’s been an accident, no one but Panoptic and the Gutierrezes has a clue.

Aunt Thea is a hostess-ninja, basically.

“The senator funneled millions in grant money to Chimera,” she explains to me. “I guess that was enough to put him on her list.”

“Who the hell is she, and why does she have a list?” I grumble, accepting the wad of cocktail napkins she slips me and stuffing them in my sleeve to soak up the blood.

“That knife will help answer that,” Mom says, nodding to the forensic tech tugging the throwing knife loose from Ramirez’s discarded vest. “Prints, residue, whatever SCPD can pick up.”

“Why don’t you go home and get that taken care of?” Aunt Thea says, nodding at my arm.

I glance at the boss. Mom nods firmly and says, “We’ll mop up here.”

It’s one in the morning when I get home, and Abby’s in the kitchen when I come through the back door in my shirtsleeves. She looks up from her glassbook and her steaming mug, and she pales at the sight of my bloody arm. “Jonny, what happened?”

“Those stitches didn’t hold,” I say, shrugging. “You think you can bandage it up for me until Mom gets home?”

She rolls my sleeve back gently, and I look away from the angry red gash and the little crooked spider legs of broken sutures. Abby turns even paler, but she doesn’t avert her eyes. “I could do it,” she says in a very small voice.

I saw what she did to those orange peels. But I also saw the little nod Mom gave her when she bandaged me up in the first place - the nod that looked so much like the one Dad gives me sometimes. “I’d appreciate it.”

She runs to get the medkit in Mom’s office, and on a dish towel draped across the kitchen table, I lay out my arm for her. She cleans out the wound, tweezing out scraps of bloody cocktail napkin, and she sterilizes the hell out of everything just like Lanie taught her. She takes her time threading the needle, and I can hear her carefully measuring her breathing.

Her hands shake as she makes the first stitch. On the second, I can’t help hissing in pain.

She stops. “Am I hurting you? I’m hurting you.”

Her unsteady hands are tugging on the needle hooked in the raw meat of my arm, but that’s only because she's nervous.  “The hole in my arm is hurting me. You’re doing fine.”

A lot of deep breaths later, she tapes down a bandage.

“Thanks, Abby.”

“Welcome.” She dredges up a smile and says, “Maybe don’t go ruining these too?”

I give her a swat toward the hallway. “Go to bed, smartmouth.”

 

 

We spend the next morning at Panoptic sorting through the events of last night and fielding a dozen new client queries. Not until late afternoon does Mom come to my office and say, “Jon, could you come with me for a minute?”

I follow her to the conference room, where my father and Aunt Thea are waiting.

“The blade has been tested for everything I could think of,” Mom says the moment the door has closed behind us. “SCPD tried to lift a print. No good. I looked for blood, sweat, anything that might give us DNA. Nothing.”

“Hi, Dad,” I say deliberately, pulling out Mom’s chair for her. “Hi, Aunt Thea.”

Mom stays on her feet, hands coming up in an anxious gesture. “What I found instead was - ”

“Hold on, didn’t you give that knife to SCPD in an evidence bag?”

“I swabbed it first,” she says impatiently. “I wasn’t going to wait on them. And, Jon, I found Tibetan pit viper venom.”

I frown at her. Then, in a complete deadpan, I say, “Oh, God, anything but that.”

“It means we’re dealing with an Assassin,” Dad says, and I can hear the capital letter.

I turn to face him. “Are we talking League of Assassins? That kind of Assassin?” I say. “Because I thought they didn’t exist anymore.”

“The cult doesn’t,” Aunt Thea says, “but it’s not like we killed every last member when we took them down.”

Mom gives her a stern look. “Close protection at all times, you hear me?” she says. “And you’re sleeping at our house. You can’t argue with us now.”

Aunt Thea nods assent.

Dad’s jaw sets. “It’s been twenty-five years since one of them set foot in Starling. I thought they knew better.”

Mom crosses her arms, sinking into the chair I’m still holding out for her. “Apparently not.” She turns to me, fists clenched on her knees. “Jon, I don’t know if I can explain to you how dangerous this woman is.”

“I kind of figured that out when she shoved me off a balcony.”

She and Dad exchange glances, and he says, “That was her exercising restraint.”

I sink into the chair opposite Mom. “Oh.”

“I’m trying to get a hold of Sara, see if she can ID her for us at least. If we figure out why she’s targeting CI…” Mom sighs.

“It’s not out of character for the League,” Aunt Thea says.

Mom makes a moue. “They were a bunch of luddites.”

Aunt Thea nods agreement. “They had all these ideas about a ‘natural order.’ Industrial capitalism was raping Gaia, therefore murder. Humans are a scourge on the earth, murder. Topple their false gods, murder. Put them back in their place, murder murder murder.”

Mom frowns. “Thank you for making concern for the environment sound so creepy and fringe.”

“You only like the environment because you’ve never been in it,” Aunt Thea scoffs. “Try camping on a mountainside at Nanda Parbat sometime.”

“Staying on topic,” Dad cuts in smoothly. “Cuvier’s co-workers aren’t the only ones she might target. If she can’t strike at the doctor himself, by League law his blood would be the next best thing.” Dad looks right at me.

“Tish.”

He nods solemnly.

“That makes no sense. She had nothing to do with those people’s deaths.”

“The League’s idea of justice is nothing you’d recognize,” says Aunt Thea. “It’s ancient.”

“It’s not concerned with _mens rea_ or individual culpability,” Dad says. “Blood demands blood. A life for a life, and for wounds retaliation.” He takes a long, slow breath. “It might be best to have Tish at the house again.”

Not an hour later, Dig and I show up at Tish’s efficiency apartment.

The looks on our faces must be pretty serious, because she answers the door with, “What’s wrong?”

“The Archangel is more dangerous than we thought,” Dig says, “and we’ve got good reason to think she’ll target you. It’s not safe for you to stay here anymore.”

She swallows. “Where is it you want to take me?”

“You’ll be safest with my family,” I say, “and you’ve already got a toothbrush there.”

Her face falls. “I couldn’t. Not again.”

“Don’t mistake this for a polite invitation,” Dig says in his dad voice. “We’re not asking, we’re telling.”

Her lips purse. I see the bus coming, and I throw him under it. “He’s telling,” I say, pointing at his chest. “I’m here to carry your suitcase.”

I’ve surprised a smile out of her. She leans one hand on the doorjamb, nods, and says, “I’ll get packed.”

When we get home, Hall is at our dining room table, eating dumplings with Dad and discussing how to handle the media coverage of the killer. They stand when we come in, Dig gesturing Tish in first and me bringing up the rear with forty pounds of luggage hanging from both shoulders.

Dad greets Tish with a smile and a nod. He’s pretty free with hugs when it comes to Elaine or the Allen brats, but he is careful to give Tish space. I think he knows that he makes her nervous. In the weeks she spent at our house after her father died, she seemed drawn to Dad like a sunflower tracking daylight. At first the shy smiles and careful posture looked like a crush to me, which made me want to wash my brain out with soap and also possibly shoot someone. But when I saw the longing on her face when he hugged Abby, I thought I understood.

“Thank you for taking me in again,” she says with a self-deprecating little smile.

His brow furrows, and he tips his head to her. “You are more than welcome.”

“Mr. Diggle, I heard a rumor you and your wife were finally retiring,” Hall says, shaking Dig’s hand. “No kidding, for real this time.”

“The plane tickets are booked. This time it’s for real.”

She grins. “I’ve heard that before.”

Very seriously, Dig says, “I don’t think you understand. The hotel has an infinity pool.”

She laughs. “Well, if I don’t see you, thank you for all of Panoptic’s cooperation and support these last few months.”

“Pleasure’s all ours.”

Hall turns to Tish and lays a hand on her shoulder. “Miss Cuvier, I hoped I wouldn’t see you again so soon. No offense.”

Tish smiles thinly. “None taken, and likewise.”

“Well, you’re in good hands here.”

She looks at the floor and murmurs, “I know.”

After Hall takes her leave, Dad, Dig, and I sit Tish down on the sofa and lay it all out for her, which mostly consists of them trying to impress upon her just how much danger she’s in.

“Some of the measures we’re taking might seem like an overreaction,” Dad says, “but please take them seriously.”

“This is going to mean restricting your movements somewhat,” Dig says.

“What about my classes?” she says. “Last semester, I withdrew right in the middle. I can’t start over, not again.”

“Yeah, we figured you wouldn’t want to,” I say. “That’s why you’ll have a Panoptic protector with you during the day.”

“After dark, we’re going to ask you not to leave the house,” Dig says. “There’ll be someone patrolling the neighborhood and someone else inside.”

She nods. “Who will be with me during the day?”

Dig looks at me, and I shrug. “I haven’t made the assignment yet. Did you have someone in mind?”

Tish gives me a look I can only describe as hopeful before she opens her mouth to answer, and my brain kicks into overdrive cranking out rationalizations for how I can totally coordinate two dozen bodyguards while skulking around the back of her Language Development in Children class.

Then Tish closes her mouth and smiles at the floor. “Ms. Ramirez and I got along very well.”

“We can make that happen,” I say, and it is stupid to be disappointed. I couldn’t have shadowed her anyway.

A few minutes later, I shoulder Tish’s bags again and she follows me upstairs. On our way through the hallway to the second floor guest room, we pass Abby’s closed door, and we hear voices.

“What good is the woman going to do? It’s not like I can tell her the real reason I can’t sleep is because maybe Jonny’s dead in an alley somewhere and I just haven’t heard about it yet.”

I stop in my tracks. Almost simultaneously, Tish stops with me.

“Abigail,” Mom’s voice says. “You are going to your appointment, and that’s final. Put real clothes on and brush your hair.”

She stalks out of the room and shuts the door a little too hard behind her. When she catches sight of us, her irritable expression turns to something weirdly guilty. She looks like she might say something. Then her lips purse, and she heads for her room.

“Thank you for carrying my things,” Tish says as if absolutely nothing happened, and the words get me moving again.

In her room, I heft her bags higher on my shoulder and say, “Where do you want these?”

“The bed is fine until I can unpack,” she says, sinking down onto the mattress and tangling her fingers in her lap.

I set her stuff down at the foot of the bed. She looks very small and a little lost, perched on the edge of the queen-size mattress with her feet dangling off the floor.

“Tish?”

She looks up at me wearily.

“At dinner the other night, you were talking about your father, weren’t you? The kind of man who sees the bigger picture?”

Her eyes widen, but then, with a note of bitterness I’ve never heard before, she says, “Him and a thousand visionaries like him.”

“I’m sorry that what he did is coming back on you.”

“I suppose I’m all that’s left of him.” She braces her hands on the edge of the mattress on either side of her. “Me and his work.”

The work he was willing to let her die for. “He didn’t deserve you.”

Her eyes flash, and when she speaks her voice is pitched a few steps lower than usual. “I know what he was, but he was my father. He loved me, as much as he was capable.”

My stomach turns over. Abel Cuvier was a genius serial murderer whose soul resembled something crawling from a geothermal vent, and not for a moment did I imagine he was easy to live with. But only now does it hit me, why Tish braces herself every time someone smartasses Dad.

Does she even hear herself? As much as he was capable?

“Not good enough,” I say through my teeth.

Her nostrils flare, and I see a flash of the ice queen who stared down Desilva. “You don’t know a damn thing about it.”

“I know he scared the hell out of you.”

Her eyes narrow. “He never laid a hand on me.”

No, the doctor was more sophisticated than that. “But you were afraid of him.”

She regards me coldly for a long time. Finally the ice melts at the edges, and she looks away. Almost too soft for me to hear, she says, “I didn’t know how much until I didn’t have to be anymore.”

Let’s dig up Abel Cuvier and kill him again. Let’s do it with a rusty butter knife. “He didn’t deserve you.”

She meets my eyes. “I am sick of being afraid.”

Dig used to tell all of Panoptic’s new hires, _You don’t tell them not to be scared, because what the hell good is that going to do? And you don’t promise everything is going to be all right, because you are not God. What you say is -_

“We’re not going to let anything happen to you.”

Tish gets to her feet. Very deliberately, she comes over and hugs me around the middle. I’ve had my arms around her practically every weekend for the past couple of months, but I’ve never held her just to hold her. The trusting way she lays her head on my chest makes me feel... calm. Sure of myself. Like I could wrestle a bear right now, if somebody dared me.

“Thank you,” she says.

My hand covers the back of her head. “Yeah. Course.”

A couple hours later, Abby comes home from her therapist unnaturally quiet, and at dinner she picks at her food and hardly says a word, right up until I mention how much I hate getting rained on in all that leather.

She tips her head at the rain slapping the windows, and she says, “Are you going out in that?”

I glance at Mom. “Nah. Stalled on this case. No point in getting wet chasing nothing.”

Mom gives me a look of mild surprise, but she lets it pass.

After Abby falls asleep, I slip out the back door. In the garage, the Ducati’s engine growls to life and then calms to a purr, and I pull my helmet and leathers on against the rain.

When Mom gets on the comms not long after, the first thing she says is, “You lied to her.”

I lean into the turn on South Courtley.  “She can’t worry if she doesn’t know.”

Mom sighs. “It will be scarier later, not knowing if you’re telling her the truth.”

“If she finds out.”

There is a long pause. Then, businesslike, Mom says, “Let’s see what we can rustle up. Remember, this is just recon. You’re not going to pick a fight with an Assassin without backup, right?”

“I’m taking her seriously, Watchtower.”

That’s not exactly what Mom wanted to hear, but I guess it will do.

 

 

 

The next morning, the Star Herald runs an article on the attack at Couture for the Cure, and on their site Jolie Page editorializes at length about how Chief Hall and Mayor Queen hushed it all up for the sole purpose of allowing Thea Queen’s silent auction to proceed.

“Of course,” Dad grumbles on vidchat. “It had nothing to do with avoiding a panic.”

“Damage done, Oliver,” Mom says. “And you know, we’ve never gotten back on good terms with the Star Herald since the time you smashed a six thousand dollar camera.”

“I paid for it.”

“I’m just saying, it might be time to mend bridges. Or build some in the first place.”

After the news breaks, half of Chimera’s donor list comes to Panoptic seeking protection. If we stretch ourselves much thinner, we’re going to start getting sloppy, so after accepting one more client, we start referring people to other firms.

“Not them, Mom,” I mutter, the first time I overhear her recommending L & R Security.

“They were the best back in the teens when we were - you know,” she says, frowning at me. “And I thought you knew Glenn.”

I know Glenn Larsen in the sense that I have called him an asshole to his face twice now. “We have very different ideas about the, ah... temperament and sense of restraint necessary in security personnel.”

“Okay,” Mom says. “Not them.”

It’s a long, pain in the ass day at work, and that’s just the day shift. I’m already exhausted when I leave Panoptic at dusk, and I’ve got several hours on the streets in the chilly mist to look forward to.

When I come through the front door, my parents and Abby are in the living room having the closest thing to a fight that I have ever seen.

“Abigail, you cannot _lie_ to us like this,” Mom says, white-lipped with fury.

Abby sits on the sofa, tears streaming down her face, glaring at the coffee table.

I catch Dad’s eye, and he quietly ambles over to me as I come into the room.

“What’s going on?” I mutter under Mom’s rising voice.

“We are happy to give you the help and support you need,” Mom is saying, “but how are we supposed to do that if you won’t be honest with us?”

“The principal just called,” Dad tells me quietly. “Why don’t you head upstairs?”

“Three Fs and two Ds,” Mom says in the same tone she once used for, _Jonny totaled the car and got arrested_. “You haven’t turned in an assignment in three weeks! Abby, you told us midterms were fine. Did you think we weren’t going to notice?”

“I don’t know what I thought,” Abby murmurs.

I hesitate. Dad jerks his head at me, and I turn to go.

“Don’t suit up tonight,” Mom snaps at me.

“Got to follow up on that lead in the Warehouse District.”

“We’ll find exactly as much as we did last night.”

Abby looks over at me. “You told me you weren’t going out last night.”

Shit. Shit shit _shit_ on a shingle.

Mom bites her lip, because even when she disapproves of people’s fibs, as a rule she doesn’t go around telling on them. Dad goes almost motionless and avoids looking at any of us with the skill and class of long experience.

“I thought I wouldn’t have to,” I mutter. “Then something came up - ”

“Oh my God, Jonny, don’t keep lying to me,” Abby says, more pleading than angry.

“I didn’t want you to worry,” I say quietly. “I know it’s hard for you, and I thought maybe - ”

“It isn’t hard for me!”

I take a bewildered half-step back.

“You’re doing the hard part,” she says, voice choked with resentment. “Everybody else does the hard parts, and I just - look, all I have to do is worry, and apparently I can't even handle that much, but can I at least worry about what’s actually happening instead of whatever my imagination comes up with?”

“Abby,” I whisper. “What are you talking about?”

“Stop trying to take care of me all the time! I am the only person in this house who's not expected to take care of anyone but myself, which I suck at, and you all just keep doing it for me, and just - please, stop.”

I was expecting to get reamed out for lying. This is… this is something different. I don’t know what to do with this. I look to Mom and Dad for help, but all they’ve got is two heartbroken expressions - Mom’s aimed at Abby, Dad’s at the hearth.

“You don’t have to, okay?” she whispers, lip wobbling. “I don’t want you to.”

She lost me several sentences ago, and now she’s about to cry, and she’s standing there telling me that every one of my instincts right now is wrong wrong wrong, and I just do not know what the fuck to do here. I swallow hard. Try to think of something to say. Come up empty.

“It’s not like you ever wanted me to know anyway,” she mutters. “You only told me about the hood because you got shot and couldn’t hide it anymore.”

I know how lame it sounds before it even leaves my mouth: “I was going to tell you eventually.”

Dad winces.

“When I was older, right?” she scoffs. “You didn’t think I could handle it, and here I keep proving you right. And between the medicine and the therapy and all these people practically jumping up and down to help me, I really have no excuse not to be fixed yet.”

“Abigail,” Dad says hoarsely.

Her shoulders hunch away from him, and she’s crying in earnest now. “Just go, Jonny. I’ll be right here when you get back, and I’ll be fine.”

Is she kidding? She’s crying. I can’t go anywhere until I fix it.

But even the slightest half-step in her direction has her shifting her weight away from me. She doesn’t want me to fix it. She wants me to go away.

“Please,” she says.

I do as she’s asking.

Once I’m suited up, cruising Duwamish on the bike, I check in with Mom on the comms. I get a distracted, “Can it wait a few minutes?”

All I’m doing is running down leads that are probably dead ends anyway. “Yeah, sure.”

But she forgets to click off.

“Hey, come here,” she says. “Oliver, come here.” She makes the gentle, comforting noises I remember from nights I woke up gasping because the painkillers had worn off. It’s something between a hum and a sigh.

“Felicity, I don’t know what to do,” Dad says, and he sounds like he’s got a bad cold. “I can’t save her from this.”

I tap the comm off on my end.

Three hours later, I have exactly as much on our Assassin as when I started.

On my way home, I’m swinging the bike through the sharp turn on Seventh and Philpott when I notice the Jokerz on the corner, and I slow to a crawl. Three of them are determinedly wriggling a stop sign loose from the packed dirt.

I am _done_ with these shitheads.

I put my feet down. An arrow thuds into the O of STOP.

“Put. The fucking. Sign. Back.”

Three identically moronic clown masks swing my way. They look at the arrow I’m currently pointing at them. They look at the one still quivering in the sign. They look at each other.

Respectfully, with no sudden movements, they drive the sign back into place.

Five minutes later, I’ve tied them to the nearest streetlamp, masks hanging around their necks by the cheap elastic. I rip a concert flyer off the post, scrawl on the back, and pin it above their heads with the stiletto I found in one kid’s pocket. _We are cowardly pissants who steal stop signs_.

Then I get back on the bike and head home, leaving them bitching and whining behind me.


	4. Chapter 4

The next day at Panoptic, Mom and I both put in a twelve-hour shift. The influx of new clients - mostly donors to the Chimera Institute afraid of meeting the same end as Belfort - has us all working overtime. It’s mid-afternoon when Mom gets a chance to summon me to her office and pull up a police report. “I got an alert about this earlier, but there wasn’t time to look into it. Triple homicide in the St. Stephen corridor.”

That can’t be right. “I was out there last night. How did we miss it?”

“Time of death is estimated at four o’clock this morning. Three teenagers, all found with Glasgow grins inflicted post-mortem. SCPD suspects the Three-Sixteen.”

Cold washes over me. “Where?”

“Corner of Seventh and Philpott.”

I sink into a chair. “I left them there.”

“What?”

“I left three Jokerz tied up like a present on a rival gang’s turf. I knew they had a feud going, but I didn’t… I didn’t even think.”

Mom spins her chair around to give me her undivided attention. “You didn’t mean for this to happen.”

“Doesn’t matter what I meant. They’re dead. Just asshole kids, stealing a stop sign. And I got them killed.”

“This is not your fault, Jon.”

“Mom, don’t.”

I get to my feet, and for a minute, she watches sympathetically while I pace in front of her desk. When she apparently decides I’ve done enough of that, she gets to her feet. “Come on, let’s go downstairs. You grab the bow, I’ll grab the tennis balls.”

I stop, and I deliberately unknit my shoulders. My mom is no dummy, and we both know I’ll feel better if I pin a couple dozen of those things to the wall.

I don’t want to feel better. “I’ve got three close protection plans to write up and six bodyguards asking to swap shifts. We don’t have time for that.”

Mom sighs. “All right. Back to work.”

 

At nightfall, I go hunting.

“Are you sure you’re okay for this?” Mom asks quietly on the comm.

“I let my personal crap cloud my judgment once. You think I’m going to let it happen twice in the same week?”

Half an hour later, SCPD’s top suspect twists by his ankle from the roof of the old metalworks on Philpott. His shirt has fallen down to his armpits, and on his back the huge, stylized 316 tattoo gleams by the light of the street lamp.

“I didn’t do nothin’!” he yells.

I know that. Mom has already alibi'd him out; traffic cameras place him eight blocks away at the time of the murders. But SCPD had their eye on Herbert Grimes for a reason.

"You know who did," I say, letting my knife flash right next to the bola. I'm not going to cut him down from this height. Thirty feet will kill him. But I’ll let him wonder.

He tries to jackknife up and grab his tethered ankle, but all he accomplishes is to set himself swaying. "I ain't in the shit no more."

I would find that more convincing if that traffic cam hadn't recorded him robbing two women at gunpoint. "Their names, Grimes."

"I give you names, they kill me too."

Whoops, he slipped. Ten feet in two seconds.

Grimes doesn't even scream - he just yells in pain when the line goes taut. "The Arrow," he pants, "the Arrow don't kill. Those fuckers do."

I swallow down a growl of frustration.

"Grimes. Let's talk." I haul him back up to the rooftop with me, reach down, grab him by the collar, and tilt my head to deepen the shadows under the hood. "I want you to think about something for me. If the Arrow had killed someone, what makes you think you'd know?"

"Well, the... you know," he mumbles. "The arrows."

"The arrows," I repeat in the unimpressed monotone I learned from Dig. "Grimes, listen to me carefully. If I killed someone - you, for example, right now, for example," I nod at the concrete forty feet below, "how would anyone know it was me?"

He pales.

I drop him.

This time, he screams.

I get my names, and I give Grimes to Hall.

"Both of the names he gave us are attached to some very impressive juvenile records," Mom says in my ear as I climb on the bike. "Unfortunately I can't pin down any last known addresses, so finding them will take some time. They were both expelled back in April, and since then I guess they've fallen through the cracks."

I grind my teeth. "How old are they?"

"Seventeen."

I lean a little harder on the throttle. "Kids killing kids."

Mom pauses, and I can picture her knitted brows. "Come on home, honey. There's nothing more we can do tonight."

When I get home half an hour later, Tish and Aunt Thea sit on the sofa with two fancy-looking cocktails that Aunt Thea probably invented herself.

Tish lays a hand on my arm as I pass by. “Everything okay?”

Everything’s fine springs to the tip of my tongue. But I find myself saying, “Bad night at work.”

“You hungry?” Aunt Thea says.

After a few hours on rooftops or beating the hell out of a training dummy, I’m usually ravenous. Not tonight. I grab Aunt Thea’s shoulder and give her a little jostle, because she’ll swat me, and that will feel normal. Yep. There we go. “Is my friend Elijah Craig invited to this party?”

It’s a bad idea. I don’t drink much anymore. After the surgery, I wasn’t allowed, and these days anything that interferes with sleep or causes unusually vivid dreams is no friend of mine.

“Pull the bottle down, and I’ll make you something interesting,” Aunt Thea says.

A couple minutes later, I take my drink to the loveseat opposite them and sink down heavily

“I haven’t even seen the film, but I think I might be better off,” Aunt Thea says, and they launch back into Oscars speculation. Aunt Thea takes a professional interest, as she’ll be dressing some of the attendees, and Tish “just cannot believe that an actual block of wood has been nominated for Best Supporting Actor.”

“Yes, it’s tragic how he missed his calling as a Pinewood Derby car.”

I nurse my drink and listen with half an ear. Hit the bottom of the glass. Pour another one. I’m on my third when my aunt begs off to go to bed.

“You’re very quiet tonight,” Tish observes when she’s gone.

I answer with a shrug. Shrugs are quiet.

“Sometimes talking about it can help.”

I swing my gaze her way and look her right in the eyes. “I made a bad call, and three teenagers died.”

She doesn’t argue or try to tease out all the reasons it’s not my fault. She just looks back at me steadily and says, “I am so sorry.”

My shoulders slump, and the breath leaves me in a rush. “I was off my game, still pissed off about...” But that is Abby’s business, not for me to tell. “I’m supposed to represent something when I put that hood on, when I take up that authority. I can’t disrespect that over my personal crap. It can’t be about me or how I feel or whether I’m having a shitty day.”

“You’re still human.”

“The Arrow isn’t.”

Very quietly, Tish says, “He bleeds as red as anybody.”

I duck my head. “He has a code. Without it, I’ve seen how far I’ll go, the things I’m willing to do to people. And this Assassin, I mean, I see what she’s doing, looking for justice outside the law.” I must be more of a lightweight than I thought these days, if I’m running my mouth like this after three drinks. “There’s no big thick line drawn in Sharpie between me and her.”

“You don’t hurt innocent people,” Tish says.

“Used to be, I didn’t kill people either.”

"Honestly, Jon?” Tish ducks her head to catch my gaze, and with calm conviction she says, “The next time a man threatens to rape someone in front of you, I hope you kill him too.”

If she knows the second worst thing about me, she might as well know the worst: "I'm not sorry." I sit up straighter, holding her gaze. “I’d take a piss on his gravestone if he had one. For my family, I can imagine doing a lot worse, and it just… scares me some.”

“It seems to me,” Tish says gently, “that no one who does what you do ever comes out of it with perfectly clean hands.” She abandons her drink to come sit next to me. “Your father didn’t.”

I give her some side eye, and then I sigh into my hands. “God damn it, couldn’t you be just a little bit dumber?”

She smiles. “He carries himself exactly the way you do.”

“Is that what tipped you off?”

“No. But it got the wheels turning.” She smooths her skirt down, and asks me with her eyes downcast, “It was him in the gray hood, the night Risdon had us, wasn’t it?”

“Yeah. It was.”

“Then I owe him my life too.”

I close my eyes and sink back into the cushions. “It wasn’t a loan, Tish.”

“He was a killer and a criminal and a hero, sometimes all three at once,” she murmurs. “You’re not so different.”

“I am not my father.”

As a teenage fuck-up, I’d like to think I did not even approach the depths of scumbaggery that he did at that age. As a vigilante, I have definitely not racked up a body count in the dozens, nor have I alienated half the people I love. Extra points for having never, ever, not even once slept with a psychotic domestic terrorist who used to be my father’s mistress.

But I also haven’t spent five years in hell and somehow managed to claw my way out with a soul. I haven’t spent years doggedly proving my trustworthiness to people who’d given up on me. I haven’t died saving the city (literally, Mom says his heart stopped for fifty-three seconds) or died saving someone I love (that time it was seventeen seconds). I haven’t built a family out of torn-up scraps.

Dad has never so much as implied that I don’t measure up to him, but he doesn’t have to. There he is, larger than life. And I am a competitive bastard.

Through the whiskey haze, I mutter, “I’ll never be the man he is.”

Tish slips her hand in mine, and her fingers are soft and a little cold against my calluses. “I like the one you are.”

If we keep talking, I lose the sense of it. Sleep drags me down.

 _What do you think I’ll do to her, you don’t tell me what I want to know?_ Risdon says.

Hands bound, no rescue on the way, no scalpel between my fingers, all I can do is beg. _Don’t touch her. Please don’t touch her._

_Their names._

I can’t give him my family. But if I don’t give him something, I’m no better than her father.

 _I am not a patient man_ , Risdon says, and his hand - fuck, where is his hand going?

_This can’t be happening, I will kill you if you touch her you hear me I will fucking kill you -_

“Jon. Jonathan.”

I wake with my head cushioned on somebody’s lap.

“Hey,” Tish says, fingers running up and down my arm. “Hey, it’s ok.”

If I’d had one more hour of sleep last night or one less drink tonight, I would not turn toward her or bury my face in her cashmere sweater or breathe in the dark, rich smell of her. But she only pets my hair when I do, so it must be all right.

“Was it Abby, in the dream?” she says softly. Her fingers trace the ridge of scar tissue just below the shoulder seam of my T-shirt.

I shake my head into the softness of her belly. “You.”

Her fingers go still.

For once my mouth doesn’t run away with me, and I rein in the No, keep doing that before it even hits the tip of my tongue. “What time is it?”

“About five.”

I start to roll over. “Might as well get up. Not getting back to sleep now.”

She holds fast. “Why don’t you try?”

“This isn’t my first rodeo. Trust me, I’m up for the day.”

“Just try.” Her fingertips start dragging up and down my arm again. “Please.”

If I do as she says, the worst that can happen is I’ll lie awake for a long time with my head in a pretty girl’s lap. I’m about to say, “Okay, bossy” when she starts to hum.

It is simple and mournful in a minor key, and it puts me in mind of long winter nights and the rustle of cold wind through evergreens. I breathe in deep and slow, press my ear to her belly, and feel the hum resonate through her body. Through mine too, I guess.

I drift away on her voice.

When I wake three hours later, I’m alone.

In college there were girls who came home with me eagerly enough and then spent the remainder of our school career acting like they didn’t know me. It stung some with the ones I really liked, but another one usually came along shortly.

I imagine Tish pretending nothing happened last night, and the bottom drops out of my stomach.

Then I walk that sentence back, because for fuck’s sake _nothing happened_ last night.

I shake it off, and I go upstairs to change for work.

 

By eight in the evening, I’ve gone through six threat assessments, I’ve had all the coffee my stomach can stand, and I’ve fallen asleep sitting up twice. I’m ninety percent finished with the last one for the day when Mom summons me to her office.

“Little busy,” I grumble. “Give me ten minutes?”

“Somebody needs to talk to you.”

On vidchat on the wall of Mom’s office, Sara smiles at me warmly. The wall behind her is blank beige, but it looks like daylight where she is. “Hello, Mr. Managing Director.”

“Hey, Ms. International Woman of Mystery,” I say, sinking heavily into a chair in front of Mom’s desk. “What have you got for us?”

“There’s only one Assassin who survived the breakup of the League and who fits your description. She was called Naja, the Cobra.”

I glance at Mom, whose mouth sets in recognition. “You know her?”

Mom nods. “I remember her.”

“She was missing two fingers on her left hand,” Sara says, “and she was still one of the best swordsmen I’ve ever met.”

My eyebrows knit. “Um, unless she grew them back, this lady isn’t her.”

Sara frowns right back at me. “Are you sure?”

“She punched me in the face with that hand. I’m pretty sure.”

“There was another woman,” Sara says, looking past me at the far wall. “Ra’s al Ghul named her Shaula, the scorpion’s tail. But she’s dead. She’s been dead for twenty-five years.”

“Are _you_ sure? Because you were dead for a long time too, if I remember.”

“I saw her body,” Sara says, and though her eyes slide somewhere around my chest, it’s like she’s looking right through me. “I said my goodbyes.”

I try not to sound judgy when I say, “You were friends?”

“ _Akhawat_ ,” she murmurs. “The League was an… _ikwhaan_. Brotherhood. Assassins renounced their own blood and made the League their family. Of course I paid my respects.”

Mom smiles softly. “You were really spectacularly awful at the renouncing your blood thing.”

The lines next to her mouth deepen in a grimace. “So was Shaula. On a mission in Romania, she tried to slip away from me, and I caught her looking in on her sister. Kid couldn’t have been more than thirteen. Nadia, I think was her name.”

I sit up straighter in my chair. “Nadia Nicolescu?”

Sara looks me in the eyes. “How did you know that?”

I know the names of all sixteen of Dr. Cuvier’s victims. I know their faces. I know whether they died of asphyxia or sepsis or traumatic brain injury. Five of their bodies were never claimed, so when the county cremated them, Tish quietly found a home for their ashes. I went with her to lay them to rest, and I remember the prayer she said for Nadia Nicolescu, whose green eyes were so striking in her mugshot for that solicitation arrest. _Heavenly Father, please grant her the peace denied to her in life._

“Abel Cuvier killed the wrong lady’s sister,” I say.

There’s a long, chill silence before Sara says, “Every explanation I can think of for how she’s still alive is… unsettling.”

“Maybe this means she has a secret weakness,” Mom says. “Garlic? Crosses?”

“Headshots,” I mutter.

“If only,” Sara says with a dry laugh. “Be sure you understand who you’re dealing with, Jon. She won’t stop. Not until every trace of Cuvier has been stamped out.”

I lean my elbows on my knees and scrub my hands over my face. “Ugh, why are people so fucking crazy?”

Sara tips her head in sympathy. “I’d come in if I could,” she says, and I believe her. I won’t ask why she can’t. Since the first time it occurred to me as a small child to ask what Sara’s job was, I’ve never gotten a straight answer. My father, who takes a special joy in lying to children, used to make up a different story every time. She compiled the list of naughty and nice children for Santa Claus. She operated the giant can of spray paint that drew the lines between the countries.

From hints Mom has dropped, I’m pretty sure Sara works for Uncle Sam in some top secret capacity. I’ve heard enough stories about ARGUS to hope it’s not them, but I wouldn’t be shocked.

“I know you’ve got your own dragons to slay. Thanks for your help, Sara.”

“Take care, kiddo,” she says, and something about the quirk of her eyebrows and the nod of her head puts me in mind of her father. “I’ll talk to you soon, Felicity.”

Vidchat flickers off, revealing the windows Mom has been pulling up while we talked. One is Nadia’s mugshot, and the other is a news clipping in what looks like a Romance language but with little smileys over some of the letters. As I watch, the translation software blurs it into English in a blocky, ugly font.

“Ilinca Nicolescu,” Mom reads, “nineteen years old when she went missing and was declared dead in Lipova, Romania in 2013. Survived only by her sister Nadia.”

“Nineteen?”

“Ra’s al Ghul preferred to recruit them young,” Mom says on a grimace. “And the more they’d lost, the more they would owe him when he gave them…” She shrugs. “When he gave them what they thought they wanted.” She closes out the obituary window and adds softly, “Thea was nineteen too.”

“You mean when they tried to force her to join?”

Mom looks up in surprise. “Is that what Oliver told you?”

That’s exactly what he told me, when I asked him about the ragged scar between his fifth and sixth ribs. “Is that not what happened?”

She opens her mouth to answer me, thinks better of that, and purses her lips. “If you want to know, you really should ask Thea.” She gets to her feet, and she comes around her desk to lock eyes with Nadia, three times life size and staring back at us from the office wall. Mom tips her head sideways. “Belfort saw escorts.”

“Yeah, so?”

“That’s why he got the poison, not the nice quick beheading. Shaula was punishing him.”

“You think he ever used Nadia?” That sounds wrong. “Or saw her, or paid her, or whatever.”

“I doubt it,” Mom says on a sigh. “Wrong market. But I bet you Shaula would have made the connection anyway.”

“Ok, so tonight let’s hit up the Warehouse District, see if we can hunt down a - ”

“Nope,” Mom says firmly, turning on her heel to face me. “You are in no shape for that.”

“This is my job, Mom.”

“And you can’t do it properly on the four or five hours of sleep you’ve been getting every night for the past week.”

“We still have a lot to do.”

“Go home and rest,” Mom says firmly. “Get a full eight hours.”

“I’m twenty-three.” I realize how counterproductively juvenile that sounds the second it leaves my mouth, but damn it, “You can’t send me to bed.”

She folds her arms at me. “Go. Home.”

 

When I come through the back door, Dad and Abby are at the kitchen table with her glassbook projecting documents in front of them. Books and notebooks are scattered around them too, and Abby is swiping through the docs in midair saying, “She’ll let me make this one up, and on this I’ll get half credit if I turn it in before next Wednesday.” She looks over her shoulder at me. “You’re home early.”

Eight-thirty. Early. Yes.

“That leg all right?” Dad says quietly.

I didn’t think I was favoring it enough for anyone to notice. “Just sore.”

“There are Icy-Hot patches in the bottom drawer next to my bathroom sink.”

“Thanks.”

As I walk away, I hear Dad shift in his chair and say, “All right, Abby. What’s your plan for the history paper?”

After a long, scalding shower, I rub away the fog on the mirror and realize my stubble is getting out of control. I razor it back down to a number three and clean up my neck, so I don’t look like a freshman at the end of exam week. Then I go dig the Icy Hot patch out of Dad’s drawer full of acetaminophen, Ace bandages, knee braces, and topical pain relievers.

Collapsing into bed with the patch cooling my lower leg is about as close as I’ve come to a religious experience.

I wake at two in the morning, almost exactly five hours after I fell asleep. I guess my body thinks this is normal now. The patch has long since faded to nothing, and my leg is cramping up worse than before. Also, I’m starving. I pop a tramadol, but it will be a half hour before it kicks in. In the meantime, I head for the kitchen.

I find Tish at the stove in her polka dot pajamas, tending a saucepan, and Ramirez leaning on the island. She takes another bite out of the half-eaten apple in her hand and says, mouth full, “Uh-oh. Boss is coming. Everybody stop having fun.”

“You wouldn’t know fun if it bit you on the ass.”

“I don’t want to know how you spend your weekends, Queen.” She straightens, saluting Tish with the apple. “I’m going to go out and check on Jones.”

On her way out, with her back to Tish, she winks at me.

I’ve taken three steps when Tish glances down at my bad leg and says, “Have a seat. I’m making lait chaud à la cannelle.”

“Is that the cream thingy?” I say, sinking onto the nearest stool at the island.

“My mother used to make it to put me to sleep. Would you like some?”

“Yeah, I would.” I lean my elbows on the marble, and I reach for an apple from the bowl.

“How did you sleep last night?” she says as I crunch into it. “Or early this morning, I suppose.”

I swallow my mouthful of apple before I say, “Better than I have in a while.” I don’t know how to ask why she was gone when I woke up. It was stupid to expect her to sit up all night and be my pillow.

But in her next breath, she answers the question I didn’t ask. “I fell asleep on you too,” she admits, whisking honey into the saucepan. “I went back to my room when I heard footsteps upstairs.”

Right. Dad would have come down at his ungodly hour, and I know from experience that it is no fun to explain to that man why you are on his sofa at seven in the morning with empty lowball glasses on the coffee table and someone’s head in your lap.

I gesture at her with my apple. “You’re up late again tonight.”

Tish casts a rueful smile over her shoulder at me. She has a lot of smiles like that - neat little bows to tie up pain or fear or discomfort. “I dreamed of Shaula.”

I put the apple down. “Mom told you about her?”

Tish nods at the saucepan. “In the dream, she came to ask me where Nadia was.”

I sit up straighter. “You know she can’t get to you here.”

“Jon, I knew for three days.” Her hands go still and then lower, halfway through measuring a half teaspoon of cinnamon into the milk. “I knew where Nadia was, and I didn’t tell anyone.”

“You told me.” I get to my feet, coming around the counter slowly. “And before you say it, three days wouldn’t have made a difference. They were all long gone when we got there.”

She nods, and she gives me another one of those smiles that aren’t smiles. “Would you pull down some mugs, please?”

I grab two from the highest shelf, just because I can. Then I step up to her elbow, peering into the saucepan at the tiny bubbles gathering at its rim, and the scent of her hair washes over me. Since I’ve known her, she has worn the same perfume. She always smells expensive, like Mom does.

Not tonight.

I watch her pour me a mug, and I say, “Tish, how come you smell like a cookie?”

“New shampoo and lotion.” She leans back against the counter, sipping from her own mug. “Vanilla calms Abby down.”

My fingers tighten around the mug handle. “What do you mean?”

“Don’t ask me why, but if she starts to get upset, the smell of vanilla seems to help. Scent and memory and emotion are all intertwined, so it’s not so strange, really.”

I set the mug down too hard, and warm milk sloshes over the rim.

“It seemed like an easy way to…” She sets her mug aside as well. “ Why are you looking at me like that?”

 _He took a bullet for me_ , Abby once said. _And he smelled very strongly of vanilla_.

Before I can think better of it, I have stepped close and framed Tish’s face in my hands.

Her lips part, and her eyes are very big and very shiny in the darkness. “What are you doing?”

“I’m going to kiss you now, and it is going to be dead fucking serious. Okay?”

There is a brief, terrifying pause, and then she takes a breath and whispers,“Okay.”

Her mouth tastes like cinnamon, and her lips soften against mine willingly. She is almost a full foot shorter than me, and I have to hunch over to kiss her. But she tips her head to accommodate me. She is careful, barely opening her mouth to me, but she is definitely kissing me back.

It's not enough. I want full body contact - my tongue in her mouth and her breasts crushed to my chest and her ass in my hands. I want to strip off her cool reserve, watch it pool on the floor around her ankles.

But I pull away a few inches when her fingers twine around my wrists. We stand staring, breathing each other's air. When she starts to speak, I feel a jolt as if I missed a step going down stairs, but all she says is, "Jonathan?”

I swallow. “Right before she went to your house the night Risdon showed up there, Abby upended a bottle of vanilla over my head.”

“Beg pardon?” she says, and our hands lower together to hover just above her breasts, her fingers still circled loosely around my wrists.

“I showed up in the hood still smelling like a pastry shop, which was hard not to notice when I jumped on her. That’s why she wasn’t all that surprised when I told her the truth.”

Tish melts into a smile, and I can’t fathom why it looks so sad. “I told you she felt safe with you.”

“Are you going to keep...”

“Yes,” she says, soft but sure. “I’ll keep wearing it.”

Silence falls over us again. After a few seconds, I realize I’m staring at the wet gleam of her mouth.

Then she rounds those full lips and goes up on tiptoe, pulling herself up on my wrists. Her eyes close, and she tilts her chin up for me.

Oh, God, it’s better with an invitation.

She melts into me, grabs my shirt, and twines her arms around my neck. I’ve wanted this for months, and now that my tongue is in her mouth and my hands are in her hair, I need more. I need all of her. We don’t fit together quite right, and if I want full body contact, I can’t kiss her without both of us craning our necks. So I grab her under the arms and sit her on the counter.

There we go. Now I can wrap her up, crush her to my chest. Now it’s easy to kiss down her neck, breathe in the warm sugar smell of her, suck on the quickening jump of her pulse. Her legs are haloed around my hips, and I hike them higher and tighter on my waist. I slide my hands under her ass, fully intending to carry her upstairs.

That’s when my bad leg cramps up hard and starts to wobble beneath me.

God _damn_ it.

“Jon,” she says in my ear, and from now on can she please only ever say my name in that gentle murmur with her breath on my neck? “You should rest your leg.”

But she’s in my arms, squished tight against me, and she’s so _soft_ I hate to let her go. In general, girls are amazingly soft and smooth and touchable, but this one I could mass produce and sell as a plush toy. “You know, I think it hurts less when I’m kissing you. Let’s do that some more.”

She laughs. “You’re supposed to be catching up on sleep, _mon petit chou_.”

“What’s a moppity shoe?”

“Don’t worry about it. Come on, let me down from here, and we’ll go up to bed.”

I try to stifle my grin. “You’re coming to bed with me?”

“I am extending an invitation to sleep in my room. You’re very warm, and I think you’ll make an excellent space heater.”

Strictly a cuddle party, then. I imagine tucking her against me, falling asleep to the sound of her breathing. “Oh, I will heat your space. I will heat it so hot.”

She giggles into my shoulder - new favorite thing - and then she slides off the counter and takes my hand. “Come on.”

Upstairs in the guest room that already smells of her, she climbs into bed and throws back the down comforter for me. The second I slide in with her, I am so tired it’s hard to keep my eyes open. When she climbs under the covers with me, I pull her most of the way on top of me, and with my fingers furrowing into her thick hair, we make out lazily. Then I take a break to yawn, and she kisses my forehead and lies down next to me.

“Sleep, Jon.”

“Not done kissing you.”

“I’ll be here in the morning.”

I fit her to my side, and she nestles close, laying her head on my shoulder. She plays with my fingers where they lay on my stomach, tracing the calluses on my knuckles and then lifting my hand to press our palms together. Her fingers look tiny splayed against mine.

I squeeze her closer to my side. “Hey.”

“Hmm?”

“Does this mean you might want to be my girl?”

There’s a smile in her voice when she says, “Yes, it does. Very much.”

“Good. That’s good.”

I breathe her in, and I sleep deep and dreamless.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please note the rating on this story has gone up.

I wake to early morning light slanting across the bed. Tish sits up against the headboard, reading something on her glassbook, and I’ve got my face squashed against her hip and my arm thrown across her thighs. Her free hand strokes my side absently.

When I lift my head, she looks down at me with a bright-eyed smile, and for the first time, I understand why people go around threatening infants with, _I could just eat you up_. She is painfully adorable, and I want to devour her.

“You’re a very grabby sleeper,” she says fondly, setting the glassbook aside. “I got too hot to cuddle in the middle of the night, but you wouldn’t let me escape.”

“Um.” My hookups used to complain about that too. “Sorry?”

“No need to apologize. Come grab me some more.”

In two seconds, I’ve scooted up against the headboard myself and dragged her over to straddle my lap. I tug her hips close to mine and wriggle us into a comfortable position. This way, she’s more or less eye level with me, and there’s no danger I’ll squish her. “Like this?”

“Like this,” she whispers, nearly nose to nose with me.

We just sit and grin at each other for a stupidly long time.

“You weren’t done kissing me,” she reminds me.

I close the few inches’ distance. With her tongue sliding against mine, it’s hard to imagine ever being done kissing her. But yeah, let’s be thorough. Comprehensive. Painstaking, even. And maybe I should suck on her lower lip one more time, just in case?

When we stop to breathe, Tish rubs noses with me. “Oh, I should have tried that a long time ago.”

I don’t disagree. “Can I ask what made you change your mind?”

She leans away, sitting back on my thighs. “I told you I was sick of being afraid.”

My hands slide off her hips. “Of what?”

She casts her eyes down, staring at my shoulder. “You’ve been through some terrible things - I know you have. But do you know what it’s like to be afraid of the good things? Because so often they’ve turned out to be a lie, or they didn’t last, or they were only a shadow of what they were supposed to be?”

I shake my head.

“You were too good to be true,” she whispers, which is by far the weirdest reason any girl has ever refused to date me. “But then I turned you down, and you were just as good to me as before.”

I curve my hand around her neck, thumb on her pulse, just as I did the night she gave me her cheek to kiss. “I care about you. I wasn’t pretending.”

She meets my eyes. “People like you haven’t happened to me very often.”

I don’t know what that means - people like me - but I know I’d have a hell of a time finding another girl who stares down hitmen, cons mob captains, dances circles around me, quietly looks after my sister, laughs at my jokes, _and_ fills out a dress like that. “Likewise.”

She smiles and brushes her hand through my hair. “Are you working today?”

It’s a Saturday, but evil has never heard of the forty-hour work week. “Meeting at nine-thirty.”

“Speaking of,” she says, sliding off my lap, “does Panoptic have some kind of rule about dating clients?”

“Nah, not unless I’m guarding you myself.” I climb out of bed after her, and I flex my bad leg a few times before I put weight on it. “I assign people to my family too.”

She looks over her shoulder at me, and she bites her lip. “And what do we tell them?”

“Leave that to me. Come on, I want breakfast.”

When we walk into the kitchen, my parents and aunt and sister are already there. I announce to the whole room by way of a good morning, “Hey, she agreed to date me.”

Half a pace behind me, Tish turns bright red.

There is a brief, surprised silence, and then at the kitchen island my sister starts giggling like a fifth grader. Over by the fridge, Mom’s smile is just smug enough to mean, _I knew it_. Then she turns it on Dad with a generous helping of, _I told you so_.

 _Yes, yes, you told me_ , his answering smile says.

Still giggling, Abby tells Tish, “I’m sorry, I’m not laughing at you.”

“Yes, she is,” Aunt Thea says.

“Yeah, that’s a pity laugh,” I agree. “Shut up, Abigail.”

“You’re a brave woman,” Mom tells Tish, “and I think this calls for French toast. Not because you’re French, just because it’s festive. Strawberries on top?”

“Yes, please.”

Dad lays a hand on Tish’s shoulder on his way to the cabinet full of mixing bowls, and he gives her the warm smile usually aimed at my sister. “Best of luck.”

At the table I pull out a chair for my girlfriend (she’s my _girlfriend_ , ha, _my_ girlfriend, mine mine mine, sucks to be anyone not me), and she takes a seat with as much dignity as anyone can muster while roughly the shade of a foam clown nose.

Best French toast ever.

**  
**

My day is awesome for about five more hours.

At work, three different people give me strange looks and say, “What the hell has you in such a good mood?”

Jones folds his arms at me and says categorically, “You got laid.”

“Jones,” I sigh. “Your supervisor is going to pretend you did not just say that.” And I keep walking.

But with my back to him, a grin steals across my face.

When I get to my office, Mom is already waiting there, holding the file I just gave her half an hour ago. “You cannot shoot or charm your way out of an audit,” she says, holding it out to me. “Please go over these again.”

I sigh and hold out my hand for it.

Mom holds it just out of reach, a smile playing at her mouth. “I understand you’re a little distracted. I half-expected to see ‘Mr. Laetitia Cuvier’ scribbled in the margins.”

I scowl at her. “I am documenting that inappropriate comment about my personal life for the harassment suit I’m building against my employer.”

She grins and smacks me in the chest with the file. “Back to work, minion.”

Not an hour later, Shaula makes her next kill.

“In the middle of the goddamn day?” I demand.

“Three dead,” Mom says, pulling up the newsfeed and the police report on her office wall. “Jorge Gutierrez died horribly of an as-yet unidentified poison that I’m willing to bet is Tibetan pit viper venom. And Shaula killed two bodyguards to get to him.”

I skim the details. Johnson and Raimey, from L & R Security. I’ve met both of them. Shaula slit Johnson’s throat and disemboweled Raimey. I take a deep breath. “Is there anything we could have - ?”

“If you guilt trip yourself again, I will smack you with a rolled-up newspaper.” Then Mom frowns to herself. “I don’t know where I’d find an actual print newspaper anymore, but I will. Expressly for this purpose.”

“That doesn’t answer my question.”

“The victim had a full security detail, and we had no reason to expect Shaula to break pattern and move in the daytime. There was nothing else we could have done here.”

I nod. “Have you called Larsen yet?”

Mom makes a moue at me. “Should I have?”

“Dig and Lyla always call, when somebody loses any of their people. They say our field is one big foxhole. No strangers in foxholes.”

Mom nods. “Then you go ahead and make the call.”

Oh, goody.

Larsen answers the phone with, “What, Queen?”

Keep it simple: “I heard about Johnson and Raimey. I’m really sorry. They were good guys.” No, they weren’t, but for at least a week after you get eviscerated on the job I will pretend that you were a good guy. “Panoptic’s available if you need anything.”

There’s a long silence, then a sigh. “‘Preciate it.” And he hangs up.

There are no strangers in foxholes, but there sure are some douchebags.

When I hang up, I turn back to Mom. “This is the first time she’s killed anyone who wasn’t her actual target.”

“We stopped her getting to Gutierrez once, and she came back to finish him not three days later.” Mom slumps in her chair. “I’d say we pissed her off.”

I shove out of my chair to go to her window and stare down at the street below, as if I might be able to pick Shaula out of the crowd. “I want her in a cage.”

“A small one. With a really narrow bunk and no pillow,” Mom says. “But honey, I can’t even begin to help you find someone this far off the grid. As far as the cloud is concerned, she doesn’t even exist. I’ve got every traffic camera in the city scanning for her, but she goes masked, and she must travel well above street level, like you do.”

Even if we could find her, she might just kick me off someplace high again. “We’ve got to be ready for her next time she shows her face.”

“I’ve set up every alert I can think of.”

I turn away from the window. “I know. That’s not what I meant. For what I’m talking about, I need Dad’s help. Aunt Thea’s too.”

 **  
**  


I stay late to work with Jones on his backlogged paperwork, and it’s nearly eleven when I finally get home. When I come through the back door, I find my parents at the kitchen island with a bottle of wine.

“Hey, Dad, I need a favor.”

“What’s that?”

“I’ve been fighting pretty much nothing but thugs and ex-cons for a while now, so that’s what we’ve been training for. That’s not going to cut it this time.”

He nods. “You want practice against the League’s style.”

“I don’t have any Assassins handy, so you and Aunt Thea are the closest I’ve got.”

A shadow passes across his face, and Mom’s eyes flicker down to her wine glass.

But all Dad says is, “Yes, we are.”

I guess I’ve put my foot in it yet again, but at this point, I’m tired of feeling guilty for stepping on sore subjects when they won’t give me a map. “So can you help?”

“Of course. Tomorrow afternoon, we’ll go down to the lair.”

I nod, and I’m on my way upstairs to find my girlfriend when Dad says, “Jon, there’s something I’d like to talk to you about.”

Damn it. I have plans. Girlfriend plans. She doesn’t know about them yet, but I think she’s really, really going to like them.

When I turn back to Dad, he’s wearing a very serious expression, two fingers rotating his wine glass by the stem. “You and Tish.”

I hold up both hands. “I don’t need the talk. I’m not an idiot teenager anymore, I swear.”

That earns me a faint smile. “Not that talk.”

I frown at him. He has never had any other objections to my dating life, not even when I spent six months with a complete basket case whom I finally dumped when she told me my sister was a “spoiled Daddy’s girl.” Dad is resolutely neutral in these matters. He is Switzerland.

But not this time.

“Have you thought through all the ways your night job could affect her?”

At the kitchen island, Mom sets the wine bottle down and gives him a careful, inscrutable look.

I shift my weight over my feet. “I know I keep some weird hours, but it hasn’t been a problem so far. And, you know, she knows why.”

Dad nods patiently. “Have you given any thought to the ways that being involved with the Arrow could put her in danger?”

I cast a startled glance at Mom, who only purses her lips. I turn back to Dad. “She’s already in danger. She was when I met her. Being ‘involved with the Arrow’ saved her life.”

“You’re making new enemies all the time. What if one of them realizes she’s connected to you and tries to use her against you?”

“I won’t come running any slower if she’s not my girlfriend.”

More patient nodding. “You’re sure she knows what she’s getting into?”

“Our first date was getting kidnapped together. Then she watched me get tortured and shot. I think she knows.”

Then Dad crosses his arms, leans back against the counter, and crosses one ankle over the other. He rolls his lips together and asks the floor, “And if you die on her?”

“I - that would suck.” I sink onto a stool, and my mouth works wordlessly for a few seconds while I try to figure out what the hell he’s even getting at. “Are you telling me to dump her for her own good?”

Finally, Dad lets out a long breath and uncrosses his arms. “No. That would be stupid.”

“Then… what the _fuck_ , Dad?”

“I wanted to make sure you understood all the reasons it was stupid.”

“You…” I gape at him. “You can be a real dick sometimes, do you know that?”

“I’m a politician,” he says with equanimity. “This isn’t even the most dickish I’ve been today.”

Mom looks about ready to strangle him - eyes closed, brows raised, lips pressed into a thin line, tendons standing out in her neck. “Oh my God, Oliver.” She turns to glare at Dad. “I said talk to him. I did not say, ‘Reverse psychologize the poor kid hard enough to give him whiplash.’”

“What the hell made you think I needed talking to?” I demand.

Mom comes around the island and ruffles my hair affectionately. “You are my very favorite son. I don’t think I tell you that often enough. And in certain crucial respects, you do not take after your father at all, for which we are very grateful.”

I frown at her in confusion. Then it clicks. I turn on Dad, who looks back at me steadily. “You dumped Mom for her own good?”

“No,” he says defensively at the same time as she says, “Yes.”

I glance back and forth between them.

“We weren’t together,” he reminds her quietly.

She just purses her lips and tilts her head at him.

When he turns to me to explain, it’s at the careful pace of someone thinking through every word before it leaves his mouth. “I’d made a decision - a bargain - that I didn’t see a way out of.” His knuckles whiten on the edge of the counter, and Mom’s expression softens. “And I didn’t want to make promises if I wasn’t going to be around to keep them.”

“Okay,” I say slowly, “that’s all very cryptic.”

“Story for another time,” Mom says, settling on the stool next to me. “The point is, don’t go changing your mind on the poor girl.”

“Great. Got it.” I stifle a laugh at their serious expressions as I slide off the stool. “Good talk.”

Upstairs, I slip into Tish’s room, hoping she wants company for the evening. I don’t know if she’s always such a light sleeper or only when she knows there’s a psycho out for her blood, but she startles awake when the door opens.

“Hey, pretty girl.”

She knits her brows at me as I come closer. “You’re limping.”

I didn’t think it was bad enough for anyone to notice. “Just sore. Be fine in the morning.”

She throws back the covers for me. “Come hold me.”

Gladly.

She makes warm, dreamy noises when I lay down next to her, and she scoots back against me and settles down into the pillow. Generally speaking, I hate spooning like I hate strep throat, because no thank you to a bunch of long, tickly hair getting caught on my stubble. But Tish fits neatly under my chin. Apparently there are upsides to the drastic height mismatch.

I should let her get comfortable and go back to sleep. But I can’t resist propping myself up on my elbow, laying her hair aside, and blowing gently on the nape of her neck.

She wriggles against me. “Jon.”

That probably means yes please more, doesn’t it? Yeah, I’m sure that’s what it means.

She rolls her hips against mine when I draw her earlobe between my teeth. “Jon.”

“Hmm?”

She scoots onto her back, smiling, and tugs me on top of her.

Oh, hell, yes.

I nudge her knees apart and settle between them so I can kiss down her neck. Her nipples show through her sleek satiny nightgown, and I brush my knuckles over them, just to make her shiver. Then I slide the straps down her arms and hook a finger in the lacy neckline. “Can I pull this down?”

There is a brief pause before she says, “Yes. I, um. Yes.”

My God, her breasts are everything I imagined. Pale and impossibly soft, overflowing my fingers when I fill my hands with them. I need my mouth on them. Now.

“Tish, you’re gorgeous.”

“Thank you,” she breathes.

She makes some really fascinating noises when I flick my tongue over her nipples, and some even better ones when I use my teeth. “You’re so soft,” I whisper into the valley between her breasts. “Your skin’s just soft all over.”

But when I go to slide my hands up under her nightgown, she sits up and lays her hands on my shoulders.

“Let me take care of you,” she says.

I don’t know what she means by that, but my God do I want to find out. When she scoots out from under me, I lay down in the warm spot she’s just left. Then she turns me face down.

Huh. I adjust my expectations sharply.

She straddles me, and my back cracks loudly when she sits down.

“Mmm, that felt good.”

Then her hands glide up my back, curve over my shoulders, and with a sure grip she kneads the muscle. Hard.

“Oh, God,” I groan. “Tish.”

“Tell me if I hurt you,” she says, and she starts digging her thumbs into the knots alongside my spine.

I have not had a massage since… Julie, nearly four years ago, and the ultimate goal of that session was not relaxation. From the determined way Tish feels for trigger points and works them loose, I have a feeling there is no happy ending at the end of this one. It hurts so damn good, I’m not even disappointed.

“Tish,” I mutter, half muffled by the pillow. “Tish. _Tish_.”

“Use your words.”

I make a noise instead. It sounds like, nnnnghh.

She works her way down my back, and then she scoots down the mattress to sit next to my legs. She pulls my bad leg into her lap, and she wraps her little hands around my calf and very methodically starts working the muscle.

“Okay, ow.” I raise my head and shoulders off the bed. “Ow, ow, ow.”

Her hands go still. “Muscle pain or scar tissue?”

I think it over before I answer. “The muscle.”

More gently, she resumes working her thumbs into the fleshy part of my calf. After a minute, I relax into her hands. After five, I drift down into drowsy comfort.

When she’s done, she snuggles down next to me. “How do you feel?”

She seems to have disabled some kind of connector between my brain and every single one of my voluntary muscles. I can’t do much more than sigh happily. She smiles, pleased with herself, and I neither help nor resist when she rolls me onto my side and lifts my arm so she can curl up as the little spoon again.

“Sweet dreams,” she whispers.

They really are.

**  
**

I wake up at nearly noon on Sunday feeling like a million bucks. For the first time in weeks, nothing aches.

Tish is gone, but there is a note on the pillow in her calligraphy perfect handwriting: _Thought about waking you, but you looked too peaceful. Come down when you’re ready._

Down in the kitchen, the boss gives orders that I had better not show my face at the office today. “Let our trusted professionals be trusted and professional,” Mom says. “All there is to do is go over the police reports from the Gutierrez murder, and we can do that from home. Just check in by email and over the comms as you need to.”

That afternoon, I spend a few hours on the living room sofa, working through three cups of coffee and reading eyewitness accounts of how Shaula cut down Johnson and Raimey to get to the senator. There are crime scene photos of nauseatingly good quality.

On the coffee table, both Abby and Tish have their textbooks and glassbooks and binders spread out, and every now and then Abby leans over and says something like, “What is pi doing in there? You’re looking for the amplitude, not the period.”

Tish sighs and twirls the pencil in her fingers to erase.

Once, on her way back from the kitchen with hot tea, Abby looks at my screen over my shoulder. “Wow,” she says before I can pinch the window closed. “Your homework is really morbid compared to mine.”

“I - yeah, I guess so.”

She nods, and she goes back to her glassbook.

Not long before dusk, I set my work aside, and I catch Tish’s eye.

She raises an eyebrow delicately, suppressing a smile.

I jerk my head upstairs.

She gives a nearly imperceptible nod, but then she casts a sidelong glance at Abby. Okay, fine, I’ll leave first, and then she can follow after a reasonably non-suspicious amount of time.

I’m in the middle of figuring out how to translate that into eyebrow when my sister says irritably, without looking up from her glassbook, “Oh my God, would you two just go?”

I shouldn’t laugh at Tish for blushing. I shouldn’t, but I can’t help it. “Come on.”

Tish takes the hand I hold out to her, and she follows me upstairs.

She’s giggling when I lay her down on her bed, but I put a stop to that pretty fast with my hands in her hair and my mouth over hers. Soon she’s nuzzling at my neck, laying open-mouthed kisses along my jaw, and lightly closing her teeth on my earlobe. Eyes closed, I turn onto my side and just enjoy the attention, grabbing her ass almost absently.

Then she pushes me onto my back, climbs on top of me, and slips me some tongue. I grin against her mouth, and she nips at my bottom lip to make me stop. This is very serious business, apparently. She gives me another insistent kiss, and she rolls her hips against mine.

 _Oh, are we doing this?_ says the half of me that is still concerned with how many other people are in the house, awake, at this very moment.

 _Yes yes yes we’re doing it_ , says the half with a clue. _There are condoms in the nightstand and it’s gonna be awesome and I’m going to make her come so hard she sees stars, so hell fucking yes let’s do this._

I work her dress and her bra down to her waist, and she gasps when I fill my palms with her breasts, thumbs brushing over her nipples. I press my thigh up between hers, and she grinds back on it, which seems to me like encouragement to close my mouth around the tip of her breast. Tongue and then teeth, and in under a minute I feel warm dampness soaking through my jeans just above the knee.

But when my fingers slide under her dress and up her thigh to slip under the elastic of her panties, she freezes. “Can we slow down?”

I pull my mouth free with a wet noise to find her making big nervous eyes at me. I withdraw my hand and fit it to the curve of her waist instead. “Yeah, of course. You ok?”

“I’m fine,” she says, giving me the cool, collected smile I have come to recognize as, Oh, God, I’m not fine. “I’m just new at this.”

 _Reeeeep_. Record scratch. "New at what, exactly? "

"Sex.” She bites her lip. “I mean, are we having sex? It seemed like that's where this was going, so I thought it was only fair to. .." She swallows. "To warn you. "

“Oh.” I try to sound more curious than shocked when I say: “Completely new? Like, never at all?”

Judging by her tight smile, I have not succeeded. “Everything I’ve ever done could probably fit in the box labeled ‘heavy petting.’”

“Heavy petting,” I repeat, so that I won’t say something like, _A twenty year old virgin? I’ve heard of them, but I’ve never actually undressed one._

Tish makes a face at the headboard. “That’s what my mother used to call it. ‘You be careful with that heavy petting, Laetitia.’”

This is unprecedented. Every girl I’ve slept with has been at least as experienced as me - most of them more so - and not once have I been anybody’s first anything. “At the risk of sounding like a dick, how is that possible?”

“Twelve years of Catholic school had some very specific things to say about sex outside of marriage,” she says quietly, and oh shit, please don’t tell me we have to wait until - “But even after I decided that God probably wouldn’t mind” - oh, thank fuck - “it just never happened.” She shrugs one-shouldered. “There wasn’t anyone I could…” She won’t meet my eyes. “There wasn’t anyone.”

“Tish, what I’m trying to say is that you’re smoking hot and I doubt there was a shortage of volunteers.”

“A couple of guys broke up with me after a few weeks when I still hadn’t slept with them, and the next one broke up with me when I said I felt ready. He seemed worried I’d imprint on him like a baby duck and follow him around forever.”

Maybe I should be outraged on her behalf, but sophomore year at SCU, I stopped calling a girl after a few nights of really fun making out when it became clear nothing more would happen. If she didn’t want to have sex, I told myself, she should go date someone else who didn’t want to have sex.

“Ok, come here,” I say, laying Tish down next to me and turning onto my side to look in her eyes. I take both of her hands in mine. “We’re not doing anything you don’t want to.”

She licks her lips. “I liked everything you did.”

I lift my knee and inspect the wet patch on my jeans. “I noticed. But I think I scared you some too.”

“I might have been a bit nervous,” she admits.

“I’m sorry.”

“You didn’t know.” Her mouth twists wryly. “And I’d understand if you were a little disappointed.”

I tug down her neckline again. “Nah, not really.” Because boobs.

“Jon. Jon.”

I pause with my nose a few inches from her skin. “What?”

She’s giving me the _We are not done talking about this_ look.

I settle back against the pillows. “Look, say the word, and I am more than happy to round the bases like the major leagues. We can go at it like rabbits. I mean, I will fuck your brains out.”

She laughs at that. Thank God.

“But we’ve got time.”

She smiles at me, warm and utterly relaxed.

That’s when it occurs to me: “Is this why you’ve been so skittish?”

She blushes, which is one of my favorite things to make her do, and she presses her face against my button-down. “Maybe? In retrospect, that might have had something to do with it.”

I want to laugh. I want to hug her and give her a good shake. “Here I thought it was me you were afraid of.”

She pulls away to give me a very serious look. “Since the moment the blindfold came off, and I saw who you were, there’s not a lot that makes me feel safer than just having you around.”

Not going to lie, that is an eighty-six proof shot to the ego. So is the trusting way she nuzzles into my chest again.

“Well, maybe I was a little afraid of you,” she amends, “but not for the reasons you were worried about.”

I nod wisely. “You’re scared of me naked.”

“Thank you for putting it so condescendingly.”

“No, it’s a serious thing. I’m extremely imposing.”

She giggles into my shoulder, which I’ve decided is the best place for her to giggle. “Jonathan.”

“Tell you what.” I pull her back up and smack a noisy kiss on her forehead. “Go exploring. Get the lay of the land. Touch me wherever you want, and if you want my hands or my mouth anywhere, just ask. Or, you know, put them there.”

Wet mouth slightly open, eyes glittering like a fever, Tish says, “Can I take your shirt off?”

I grin at her. “Please take my shirt off.”

She unbuttons my shirt with great ceremony, slowly uncovering my shoulders. When she strips my undershirt over my head and lays it aside, her head tips curiously. Then she smiles, looks me in the eyes, and says, “Hey, good lookin’.”

I laugh. “Hey, yourself.”

She spends ten minutes on my neck and chest and navel and the ridges of my hipbones, dragging fingertips and gliding palms and pressing open-mouthed kisses. She takes special care to kiss the raised scar on my upper arm where Risdon shot me. Then she pulls the dress over her head, and I can touch all the soft skin I want. So lightly that I can barely feel it through my own calluses, I drag my fingers down her body and watch the gooseflesh spread until she shivers. In her white cotton panties, she wants my hands grabbing her ass, my mouth sucking on her tits, my leg between hers, my hips grinding against hers.

She can have it. Whatever she wants.

Then glass shatters.

The window at the far side of the room explodes inward. Shards tinkle onto the wood floor and something heavy thunk-thunk-thunks on the carpet. My body moves before my brain has caught up. I wrap Tish up tight, roll us one and a half turns right over the edge of the mattress, slam onto the floor on my back with her on top of me, and shove her sideways under the bed. “Go!”

She scrambles to cover, and in the half-second it takes me to spring up into a crouch all I can think is _weapon, weapon, fuck, I need a weapon_.

But the room is empty.

Slowly, I stand up straight. At the center of the enormous starburst crack in the window is a near-perfect circle about the size of a fist. In the glittering spray of glass on the floor, a baseball wobbles into stillness.

I rub the bridge of my nose. “Oh, this is some bullshit.”

The door bursts open, and Dad stands there with murder in his expression and a knife balanced in his hand.

“Dad, it’s all right.” I jerk my head at the ball on the floor. “Just the Porter brat next door again. It’s fine.”

“Where’s Tish?”

Well, you see, she’s under the bed, mostly naked. I’m too hopped up on adrenaline to give him a halfway appropriate answer, so I’m grateful when she pipes up with, “I’m fine, Mr. Queen.”

Dad’s eyes are still scanning the room, and they slide across me, standing here shirtless like a moron, and fall on Tish’s dress on the floor. _Ah_ , his expression says.

I am not embarrassed. She’s my girlfriend. We were in a room we have every right to be in, doing things we have every right to do. This is not awkward, and I refuse to be embarrassed. Seriously, Dad, wipe that knowing look off your face.

He gives me a sharp nod. “I’ll go see about getting that window repaired.”

“That would be good,” I say quickly.

Once the door closes behind him, Tish starts crawling out from under the bed, and my phone buzzes on the night stand.

“Hey, Ramirez,” I say.

Distantly enough that I’m pretty sure I’m on speaker, Ramirez says, “Sorry about the disturbance, Mr Queen.” Then, in the voice she used to use on me when I ate the last bear claw in the conference room: “Mr. Porter would also like to apologize.”

Ten year old Scott Porter stutters something about how he was just practicing and didn’t mean to, “and I knew I wasn’t supposed to practice in the side yard, because it’s not big enough, and I’m sorry.”

I can’t resist: “You’re killing me, Smalls.”

There’s a confused silence.

I cover the receiver to sigh. “Hey, it’s fine, don’t worry. Thanks for the phone call.”

I hang up and turn to Tish, who is brushing herself off with poise and trembling hands. She forces a smile. “Life is so much more exciting with an Assassin after you, isn’t it?”

She missed a spot. I reach for the underside of her breast, where my spit seems to have served as adhesive. “You’ve, uh, you’ve got a dust bunny.” I brush it away.

She meets my eyes, and she lets out a shaky little laugh. I can’t help laughing too as I draw her into my arms.

We collapse on the bed in a pile of mostly naked, semi-hysterical giggles.

**  
**

The next afternoon, Dad and Aunt Thea come to meet me at Panoptic, and when no one is paying us much attention, we slip down to the lair.

“All right,” Aunt Thea says, settling into a rolling chair at the edge of our taped-off sparring ring. “You want to learn to fight an Assassin? What you’re really fighting is your own fear. They trade in cheap psychological tricks. Don’t let him throw you off guard.”

Dad and I circle each other, and already something about the way he holds himself is different.

“All right,” Aunt Thea says, watching us intently. “Go.”

Dad and I collide.

At first, I think I’m doing pretty well. The first time I get him in a lock, Dad says, “You’re moving freely on that bad leg. Like it was never injured.”

Damn right.

Then he slips it, and he nearly takes my head off. God damn it.

As we spar, Aunt Thea keeps up a running commentary, yelling instructions to Dad in Arabic whenever she doesn’t have an English name for a form. For me, she keeps up a stream of eagle-eyed criticism punctuated with, “Yes. Good!”

Dad is at his best when he can get his weight behind those punches, and I know I’m only holding my own because Shaula’s style just doesn’t work as well on a man his size. But he does a reasonable imitation, striking like lightning, gone just as fast. I’m used to Dad meeting force with force, powering through strikes to rob me of momentum. Now he uses my momentum against me, slipping holds to lure me into his space and slam me to the floor with the power of my own attack.

For a little while, I try to imitate him, and on defense that works pretty well. But four punches into that plan, it becomes very obvious that I’m not going to beat a former Assassin at his own game. What is it Sara’s always telling me when she’s flitting around me like a murderous little hummingbird? Straight lines are fastest. Smooth is powerful, powerful is smooth.

On our next set, I finally manage a throw.

Dad hits the mat on his back, and before he’s even got his breath back he grins up at me. “Nice job.”

Aunt Thea barks something in Arabic, and he gets to his feet.

When Dad finally taps out for the third time in a row, Aunt Thea leans back in her chair and says, “That’s enough.”

I only feel marginally better about my chances up against the real thing. Maybe that’s why, as Dad and I towel off and crack open water bottles, I turn to them both and say, “Did you know Shaula?”

“Not well,” Dad says.

Aunt Thea shrugs. “Me either.”

“Can you tell me anything useful about her?”

“If we could, we’d have done it already,” Aunt Thea says.

I lean back against the med table. “Somebody want to tell me the real story of why you know her at all?”

Dad looks at Aunt Thea, and then at the floor.

She narrows her eyes at him. “Ollie, what have you told him?”

I say, “It seems like it’s more your story to tell.”

She glares at the shadowy storage shelves. “I was nineteen and angry and stupid.” Then she turns that glare on me. “My mother had just been murdered, and no one could tell me why.”

“I could have,” Dad says, with old, well-worn guilt in his eyes. “I didn’t.”

She cants her head toward him in acknowledgment. “I knew he’d been lying to me - was still lying to me - and I was just done. I didn’t,” she breathes in deep through her nose, “I didn’t want to be his sister anymore. I didn’t want to be Thea Queen. And I had to get out of Starling. So I went south, ended up in Corto Maltese. I had some high school Spanish, and after two months there, I’d gotten pretty good. Then I got in some trouble, and a man - I say man, but looking back, he was just a kid too - he saved my life. I…” I can see her weighing how much to tell me. “I trusted him,” she says after a few seconds, and something about the way she looks at the floor and the bitterness of her tone makes me pretty sure that trusted means banged. Like, eighty percent sure. “Chase told me he could take me somewhere I could learn to do the things he did, so that I would never have to be afraid again, and I believed him.”

“Who was he?”

“An-Nayyir, the shining one, was the name he’d taken in Nanda Parbat. I asked him to bring me there, and he did.”

“To Ra’s al Ghul?”

“Standing in front of that man was… terrifying. His _voice_.” She shudders. “He made me an offer, and I accepted.”

“You didn’t understand the terms,” Dad says quietly.

“Only because I didn’t ask any questions I didn’t want the answers to,” she says. “What the hell did I think swearing fealty to a bunch of shady ninjas meant? But the League kept their end of the bargain. For three months, I learned everything I could, preparing to be initiated. And then Sara came back from assignment and found me training with An-Nayyir. She was… horrified.” Aunt Thea smiles ruefully. “So she tattled on me to my big brother.”

Dad rubs the bridge of his nose. “That was one of the worst phone calls I’ve ever gotten in my life.”

“In the middle of his first date with your mom, too,” Aunt Thea tells me.

“Ra’s al Ghul knew who I was,” Dad says, looking up. “Sara was able to get me an audience.”

“So he and Roy - ” Aunt Thea takes a slow breath, bracing herself to talk about Uncle Roy the way she always does these days, “ - he and Roy and Dig got on a plane and came to drag me home by the scruff. Only it wasn’t that easy. I’d sworn an oath, and I owed Ra’s al Ghul forty deaths.”

“Forty? As in four-zero?”

She holds up four fingers, then closes her hand into an O.

I lean back against the table. “Well, shit.”

“There was a way out,” Aunt Thea says. “If I could defeat Ra’s in single combat, I was free to go.”

I raise an eyebrow at her. “You had to know that would not end well for you.”

She sighs heavily. “I could also choose a champion to represent me.”

I look at Dad, who shifts uncomfortably.

“Oh, he tried to convince me,” Aunt Thea says. “He and Roy both did. He even told me about the hood, trying to argue that he’d stand a much better chance than I would. It didn’t change my mind, but I had to admit a lot of his bullshit suddenly made sense.”

A smile tugs at my mouth. “That’s what I said.”

Dad gives a little shrug. “That’s what everyone says.”

Aunt Thea takes a deep breath. “Ra’s gave me three days to prepare, and then…” There’s a thirty-year grudge in the look she casts Dad, and it says very clearly, _You explain_.

He closes his eyes briefly, and then he tells me, “I drugged her and took her place.”

I cast a startled glance at Aunt Thea, because Jesus Christ, I’d have fucking killed him. To this day, I feel a flash of resentment, remembering him ordering me out of the Port Authority as it burned. He tried to make me go home to the people we both loved and live with that guilt, and he smiled softly when he did it.

But I also understand why he stole that choice out from under her. I have a baby sister too. So all I say is, “You dueled the Demon’s Head, and you didn’t die.”

“We thought he had,” Aunt Thea whispers. “When the drugs wore off, Roy was sitting next to me. He told me that Oliver was dead, and I was free to go.”

“How?” I ask him.

“The cold saved my life,” Dad says. “The cold and Sara and - and another old friend.”

Aunt Thea glares at a point slightly left of Dad’s shoulder. “I could have killed him myself.”

He is not proud, but neither is he at all sorry. I’d bet my inheritance that, if he had it to do all over again, he wouldn’t do a damn thing different. “Sara and Maseo brought me to help. To Ra’s.”

“That sounds like the opposite of help.”

“There was no one and nothing else for miles. I’d have died, if they hadn’t done it. Sara was owed a boon, and she asked for my life.”

“Didn’t that mean your tab wasn’t actually settled?” I ask Aunt Thea, who nods.

“I took on Thea’s debt,” Dad says. “I spent almost two months recovering at Nanda Parbat, and then Ra’s al Ghul sent me back here. He told me to carry on as I had been. He would summon me when I was needed."

I stare at him. “You were initiated?”

He lays a hand over his shoulder, where I know an arrowhead is burned into his skin. “They called me al-Sahim. The Archer.”

Well. That’s it, then. On top of being a legendary party boy, a famous castaway, a wetwork specialist for a shady government agency, a masked vigilante, and the mayor of Starling… Dad was an initiated member of the League of Assassins with the scary brand to prove it. No matter how big I go, for the rest of my life, I will never, ever be able to top that. I fold my arms. “And you broke up with Mom.”

He does not dignify that with a response.

“Did he summon you?”

Dad gets to his feet. “That’s a story for another time.”

Lot of those going around.

“Just understand that we know what we’re talking about when we tell you how Shaula’s mind works,” Aunt Thea says. “The League traded a life for a life all the time. She wants blood, and she’ll have it.”

“She’s better than I am,” I confess.

Neither of them argues with me. “She’s far more experienced,” Dad says, “and she doesn’t have your restraint.”

I nod along. “So I turn it around on her. Experience means she recognizes patterns, so I break the pattern. Make what she knows work against her.”

“She’s here for vengeance, which means she’s angry and in pain,” Aunt Thea says. “You can use that.”

I roll my lips together. “What if I can’t stop her?”

Dad gives me the sincere eyes I usually see aimed at Abby. “You don’t have to do it alone.”

“Of course not, but if it comes down to a fight, just me and her?” I shift my weight over my feet. “What if I can’t take her?”

“You tell me. What if you can’t?”

Then she kills me, and I never, ever get to have sex with Tish. “You guys and Mom and Panoptic and Hall are still going to be standing in her way.”

He give me his most serious nod - the slow one, inclining his head and looking at me from under his raised eyebrows. “We’re in this fight too, yes.”

I glance at Aunt Thea, who is watching me with a soft expression that doesn’t quite cross the line into pity. “But more people are going to die, if that happens,” I say. “Maybe Tish. Maybe whoever’s standing nearby.”

Dad looks back at me steadily.

“There is no ‘what if I can’t.’”

His brows draw together, and he lays his hand on the back of my neck. “Come on. Let’s go home.”

**  
**

At home, I go straight up to Tish’s room. It's early still - not even six - but she is already showered, dressed in one of her pretty nightgowns, and doing homework on her bed. The newly installed window to her left looks like nothing ever happened. She clears the books away when I come in, and she nestles under the coverlet.

I strip to my boxer briefs and T-shirt to crawl in and spoon up behind her. When she pulls me flush with her body, I snake my arms around her on a groan. “Been wanting you all day.”

She presses closer, reaching back to lay her hand on my hip. “How was sparring?”

“Sucked. What did you do today?”

“Class. Rehearsal. Then this afternoon Milena and Abby and I made challah.”

I prop myself up on one elbow to lean over her. “Homemade challah? Where?”

“We ate the whole loaf,” she says apologetically. “Next time I’ll save you some.”

“Yeah, you’d better,” I grumble, twining my arms tighter around her. She’s bra-less under her nightgown, and she makes some really encouraging noises when I grope her through the flimsy material. I half-expected a playful swat, but instead she arches into my hand. “Feels good?”

She nods, gathering her hair into a twist with one hand and laying it high on the pillow. “Would you blow on the back of my neck again, please?”

I stifle a laugh - God, she’s so polite - but if she wants it, she can have it. Anything.

She moans and squirms against me, and I grind right back against her ass, hand working under her nightgown. Together we slowly work the nightgown over her head, and by the time I reach down to rub her through her cotton panties, she is soaking wet.

“What do you want to do tonight?” I murmur in her ear.

“Honestly, I was hoping you had a plan.”

“I was planning to eat you out.” I press an open-mouthed kiss right behind her ear. “Can I eat you out?”

The rhythmic roll of her hips slows to stillness. “I don’t think I’m ready to, ah, reciprocate.”

“Don’t care.” I mean, at some point, I’m going to care. Eventually I’ll need to watch her lips slide down my dick as badly as I need oxygen. But tonight all I want is to make her come apart. “Can I?”

More regally than anyone this wet should be able to manage, she says, “You may.”

I’ve thrown her on her back before she has time to yelp. “Stop me if it’s too much.”

I slide a hand into her panties, and she sighs and whimpers in time with my fingers gliding through slick heat, back and forth over her clit, until I can’t take it anymore and I yank her underwear down her legs. She draws her knees together reflexively.

I kiss her hip. “Don’t have to be shy.” Her legs part when I skim my palms up her thighs, then spread wider when I sink my fingers into the soft flesh of her inner thighs. I breathe her in, and my mouth waters at the scent of her - dark and heavy and human.

I glance up at her, and when our eyes meet she lets out a helpless little huff of air. “Oh, that looks better than I imagined.”

My grin might be a little wolfish. “You imagined me going down on you?”

“Looking at me while you did it,” she says, a little breathless. “Your eyes are very, very blue.”

I close my lips around her clit, and I don’t look away until she throws her head back and sighs, “Oh, God, Jonathan.”

There is nothing guarded or careful or practiced in the way she arches and writhes and tangles her fingers in my hair. As much of her bare skin as I’ve seen so far, only now does it feel like I’m finally seeing her naked. She comes with my fingers deep in her cunt and the flat of my tongue stroking her insistently, and my name has never sounded so good coming out of anybody’s mouth.

After, I crawl up her body, my mouth and chin still a wet mess. “You want to taste yourself?”

Her blissed-out expression turns to wide, lust-dark eyes.

“Come on and kiss me.”

She obeys. With tongue.

When I settle down next to her, I might be smirking a little bit.

She gives me a soft, melty kind of smile, and she smooths her hand down my belly and, after a moment’s hesitation, palms my hard-on experimentally through the fabric of my boxer briefs.

I can’t help arching up into her hand. She runs curious fingers up the underside of my cock, sending a shiver through me. When she hooks her fingers under the elastic, I lift my hips before she has even said, “Can I take these off?”

She just looks for a long time, which may be the death of me. Then, tentatively, she touches. I try not to arch off the bed while she satisfies her curiosity, and I sit up when I can’t take it anymore. “Why don’t you let me go take care of this in the bathroom?”

“Well, but.” She bites her lip, and she blinks those big gorgeous eyes at me, and whatever she’s about to ask me to do, I am going to fucking do, no question. “I’d kind of like to see - you know, see how. If you don’t mind.”

She watches attentively while I finish myself off.

On the way back from cleaning up in the adjacent bathroom, I pause in the doorway to look her over, curled up on the pillows. “Now you should probably think up three new mind-blowing things for me to do to you tomorrow night.”

She hums a laugh. “There’s no need to look so smug.”

“Three things. I’m serious.”

“I’m thinking,” she says virtuously.

“Jonny?” my mother’s voice calls from the other side of the door, and Tish and I both freeze. I hear a knock out in the hallway, and Mom’s voice rises: “Jon!”

She’s knocking on the door to my room, and she’s not going to find me in there.

Damn it, we really need to get out of my parents’ house.

The knock gets louder. “Jonathan!”

Mom turns at the sound of Tish’s door cracking open, and there is only the briefest eyebrow raise when she sees me standing in the wrong doorway. I clear my throat. “Everything ok?”

“Suit up,” she says. “Someone just called in a bomb threat at Panoptic.”


	6. Chapter 6

“We’ll never get there through rush hour traffic,” Mom says when we rush out to the garage. She hovers near her mini, jingling her keys, and bites her lip anxiously.

“Heads up.” I toss her the extra helmet I once bought for an ex-girlfriend to ride two-up with me.

Mom grimaces at the helmet in her hands as if I just tossed her a wad of my dirty gym clothes. “You want me to get on the bike?”

“Hey, it’s how I’m getting there,” I say, throwing a leg over and reaching for my own helmet. “You can come with me or not.”

She squares her shoulders, and she climbs on behind me. When she’s got the helmet on, intercom active, and her arms wrapped securely around my waist, I turn the engine over. “You ready?”

“You know, I used to be cool,” she says, fingers tightening anxiously over my jacket. “I used to like motorcycle rides.”

“Mom, are you ready?”

“Good to go,” she says through gritted teeth.

We roar down the driveway, and Mom bites down on a very unhappy noise.

When we catch up with the bumper to bumper traffic on Duwamish, I have to get a little creative weaving between vehicles, and she can’t keep quiet anymore. She hisses every time I pass close to a car, and she makes disapproving noises with every S-curve.

“Jon, do you see that truck?”

“I see him.”

“He’s changing lanes!”

“I know.”

“Oh God, that was close.”

“Not really.”

Finally she makes a little _eeep_ noise, and I snap, “Just close your eyes or something.”

There’s a brief silence. Then: “Nope. Nuh-uh. That’s worse.” She takes a deep breath. “Okay. Dad and McKenna are already on this thing. I’m going to patch us into their comm frequency.”

Mom gets us in just in time to hear Hall say, “--sending you a bomb squad now, Oliver. They’ll be in contact with the one at Panoptic, and they can compare the devices.”

“Devices?” Mom says. “There’s one at City Hall too?”

“The mayor’s office also received an identically worded threat,” Hall says calmly, as if she fully expected Mom to butt in. “‘Protect the powerful, die with them. The charges will blow at a moment of my choosing.’”

“I want to know why the bomber has made a threat but no demands,” Dad says darkly.

“This could be our Archangel,” Hall says. “The wording is her style.”

“But a bomb isn’t,” Mom says. “The highest tech she’s used so far is a throwing knife.”

Dad makes a skeptical noise. “Felicity, double Panoptic’s presence at the house.”

“Already done. Selby and - Jonathan!” she yelps as I nearly clip an F-150.

“Are you all right?” Dad demands.

We glide right by the truck, no harm done, and I shake my head. “She doesn’t like the way I drive.”

Dad’s ruffled feathers lay back down. “Neither does our insurance provider.”

Hall muffles her laughter, but it’s a fucking comm, woman. I can still hear you.

We pull up to SCPD’s bomb squad van a block away from the office building, and Mom swings off the bike on shaky legs, holding onto my shoulder to steady herself. It’s weird - she rode shotgun flying down shipping container lanes at eighty miles an hour and hardly batted an eye. As she takes a deep breath and draws herself up, it occurs to me to wonder what horrific experience ruined motorcycles for her.

Story for another time.

As we approach the SCPD van, Captain Hall looks up at us and frowns. “There was no need to come in person.”

Mom leans past her shoulder to peek through the van’s open door. “Are you hooked into the building’s smart grid?”

“Of course,” Hall says, gesturing at the skinny little tech with SCPD printed on the back of his jacket bent over the monitors inside the van. “I’ve got John and Lyla Diggle on comms, both in the building coordinating evac.”

“Let me repurpose the HVAC sensors to look for heat signatures, and we’ll make sure we haven’t missed anyone,” Mom says.

Hall blinks. “You can do that?” When Mom’s only reply is to patiently close her eyes, Hall holds up a conciliatory hand. “Yes, please do that. You have the comm frequency?”

“On it,” Mom says, and she climbs into the van and holds her hand out to the tech with a bright smile. “Hi. Felicity Queen. Is there another chair?”

With the worshipful look I’ve seen on other professional nerds’ faces when they’re introduced to _the_ Felicity Queen, the tech shakes her hand and pulls down another folding seat for her.

That leaves me hovering uselessly among a crowd of blue uniforms muttering into their radios in a very businesslike way. I know that I’m here as a representative of Panoptic Security, mostly because I can’t be anywhere else while our people and our company are under threat, and that the best thing I can probably do right now is stay out of the way. I hate staying out of the way.

Mom keeps me on the comms, and I mute my end so I can just listen to Dig and Lyla giving calm orders, Hall putting the whole picture together, Dad checking in from City Hall, and Mom saying things like, “Ooh, one more in the men’s room on the southwest corner of Genentech’s suite. Maybe knock first.”

Five minutes later, Dad taps in to say, “Bomb squad says the device at City Hall is looking like an elaborate fake.”

“Are they sure?” Mom says.

“Not yet. But if they’re right, I don’t know that that makes me feel much better.”

“They went to some pretty extreme lengths to tie up half of SCPD and all of Panoptic,” Hall agrees. “They’ve got the whole city’s eyes here, so what are they distracting us from?”

I switch to Watchtower’s secure frequency to mutter, “I want my leathers.”

Over the comm, Mom hisses back, “They are in the basement of a building that might still explode at any second.”

Don’t care. I feel safer with the layer of kevlar, and I feel safest with the bow. “If it hasn’t blown yet, it’s probably not going to.” And I head for the side entrance, well hidden in the darkest alley, deserted now that evac is nearly complete.

“Jonathan!” Mom leans out the van to call after me in complete and total exasperation. Once I’m out of earshot, she continues via comm. “You are in so much trouble when we get home. So. Much. Trouble.”

Taking the basement stairs two at a time, I snort. “What are you going to do to me?”

“I’m going to tell Tish that I’m not comfortable with you in her room.”

I miss a step. “You wouldn’t.”

“Then get your butt out of there!”

I scowl, and I slide the rest of the way down the stairs with just my hands riding the railings. “I think you’re bluffing. And besides, I’m already here. Let me grab my gear.”

Strip down, yank on the pants, lace up the boots - it’s a familiar rhythm, and it calms the jitters of waiting around outside with nothing to do. I smear greasepaint over my eyes and pull the mask on. Slip into the jacket.

I’m reaching for my quiver when Mom says, in a very different voice, “Jon, listen to this.” She patches me into Panoptic’s comms.

“--can’t raise Jones,” Ramirez’ voice is saying. “Chacko, are you in contact with him?”

“No,” Chacko says, troubled. “Selby?”

Silence.

My blood turns to ice water.

“Jonny?” Mom says quietly.

My boots are loud on the metal stairs, and my quiver bounces off my back before I get it buckled on. I was moving before I even realized it. “I’m going.”

I race for my bike, parked in an out of the way alley, and I jump on and peel out into the rush hour traffic hell-bent for leather. I whip through an S-pattern around three SUVs, and over the comm, muted on my end, I hear Ramirez and Chacko’s voices as they work in tandem to check the perimeter, looking for Jones and Selby.

At this speed, if I strike so much as a glancing blow off a bump in the road, I am red paste on the pavement. But if I drive halfway sane, it’ll take me three minutes to get home. There’s an Assassin at my house. A lot can happen in three minutes.

I’m running a red light when I hear the first shot.

I lean on the throttle.

In my ear, Ramirez and Chacko are shouting orders - “Queens, to the safe room, now!”

Sidearms keep barking. Always in threes, just like Dig and Lyla taught us.

I skid onto the cross street with Providence, and the whole block is dark. Shaula blacked out an entire city street.

I send gravel flying in the alley behind my house - I made it in a minute and thirty-three seconds - when I hear Ramirez scream and Chacko yell her name. The handguns fall silent.

It’s a miracle I don’t drop the bike in the alley. But even as I launch myself off it and vault over the fence, my head is clear. My hands are steady. Losing my shit because it’s my sister and my aunt and my girlfriend is the fastest way to get people killed. I’ve got to rein it in. Shut it down. Drag back the big stupid guard dog straining at the end of the leash.

I burst into the pitch blackness of the house, and I nearly stumble over a dark shape laid out next to the kitchen table. I hit my knees next to the figure, and I tap on the night vision built into my mask. Chacko. An ugly gash across her forehead has left a halo of blood on the wood floor beneath her. I press two fingers to her neck, and though she is too cool to the touch, her pulse is steady.

“Watchtower, send an ambulance.”

“I’m sending everybody I can,” Mom says in a tightly controlled voice. “As fast as I can.”

Something flickers past the doorway ahead. I tap off the night vision - too easy to blind me with a flashlight - and I nock an arrow and follow as quietly as I can.

I catch the hooded figure just as she slips into the ground floor guest room. Shaula knows where the safe room is. How the fuck does she know that?

A light glows in the guest room, and the only possible source is the emergency lights shining through the open door of the safe room. Open - why is it open? It’s supposed to slide shut automatically.

I slip in after Shaula, and in a split second, I take in the room. Aunt Thea stands in front of Tish in the doorway of the safe room, holding the .38 revolver we keep stashed in there with the other emergency supplies. Tish struggles to pry loose the artsy-fartsy knife lodged in the door frame, blade reflecting the laser sensor that keeps the heavy duty door from squishing, say, someone’s foot.

Metal flashes in Shaula’s hand - another knife, long and curved.

The world slows down, and the room takes on a red haze. Does she know what I do to people who threaten my family? Does she have any fucking idea?

I fire at her wide open back. Once, twice, and again. Three arrows right at center mass.

Shaula spins and sweeps two aside with a double pass of the knife.

The last she snatches out of the air.

My eyes widen. “Holy shit.”

“I don’t have time for you, Archer.”

Tish stumbles back when the knife comes free from the door frame, and the door starts to glide shut. I’m afraid to loose another arrow; if Shaula dodges then Aunt Thea and Tish are right in my line of fire. I shift my grip on the bow and launch myself at her.

I’m three steps away when Shaula spins with my arrow in her hand and sends it thudding high in the door frame. It quivers six inches out of Tish’s reach. The laser sensor trips, and the door glides to a halt.

On Shaula’s next breath, her left hand wheels up and she whips something through the aperture. The move costs her her guard, and my bow crashes down heavily on her head. She crumples deliberately, robbing the blow of some of its power, and she rolls away from me smooth and controlled.

Inside the safe room, smoke rises from the device Shaula just pitched in there. Tish reaches down, maybe to pick it up and throw it back, but Aunt Thea barks, “Don’t touch it!”

Then she raises the revolver and fires at Shaula’s head.

In such close quarters the shot nearly deafens me, and it blows a hole in the wall where Shaula’s head was a half second ago. But she’s already moving, launching herself at me, knowing Aunt Thea won’t fire at the risk of hitting me. My guard is up, but somehow Shaula slips in a lightning jab to my ribs.

I can’t afford to make space and protect myself. I’ve got to crowd her into the corner, occupy her attention so the girls can get out. They make a run for it behind me, Tish propping up Aunt Thea, both of them covering Abby.

It’s like cornering a snake. Shaula strikes hard and fast, then coils back spring-loaded for the next blow. Death of a thousand cuts, Sara would call it. If I could just get a hold of Shaula - but holy fuck, she moves so fast I can hardly touch her. For every powerhouse punch I land, she makes me pay threefold.

I nearly crunch her knee out from under her, and her fist flies out of nowhere. I dodge, and her fist catches in the hood and tugs my head sideways. She grabs the suede and yanks, levering me right down onto the knee she jack-knifes up into my ribs. Without the kevlar, she would have just broken something.

Doesn’t matter. The girls are out the door, and so long as Shaula’s beating my ass, she’s not following them. Panoptic and SCPD are on their way, and that’s a lot of guns pointed at her, if I can just keep her here.

Then she tries to force me back onto my right leg as if she expects it to falter beneath me. Oh, Christ, she suspects. She fought Jon Queen at the gala, recognized a weakness, and now she’s trying to use it against the Arrow.

But my leg holds up just fine, because my girlfriend fixed it for me. Try again, bitch.

She lets up on that angle, then darts in and nearly tags me in the face again. This time my guard holds, and for the first time she lets out a frustrated growl. Her lip curls, and she whips that long knife free of her belt again. “You come to defend the one who wore the hood before you. Traitors and oathbreakers, he and his sister both.”

She slashes at me, and I grab her wrist. “That really hurts, coming from you.”

“He once vowed never to take another life,” she hisses right in my face. “Do you know how long it lasted him?”

Yes. Good. Keep her talking. “Too long. You’re still alive.”

“He has his part in the lake of fire, the second death.”

“Lady, you are fucked in the head.”

She twists beneath my arm and tries to dart past me. It’s a risky move, but I leap at her. Flying tackle, take her to the floor, but she slips it like a length of silk whipping through my hands. I scramble to my feet after her and aim a flechette at her back, right between her shoulder blades. She gives a sinuous little sideways shrug, and it lodges in the wall. Motherfucker, how did she do that?

I catch her quickly with my longer stride, and I nearly tangle a bola around her legs. Nearly.

The next blow, I don’t even see coming. _Bam_ , impact, and I slam prostrate against the wall behind me. She flings me to the floor by the strap of my quiver, and the back of my skull smacks off the hardwood. Then she swings back and gives me a sharp kick in the ribs with all her weight behind it, exactly in the tender place where she hit me before.

It hurts too much to swear. It hurts too much to breathe.

I’m gasping on the floor, and Shaula’s gone, darting after the girls, moving fast and easy.

No. No no no no no.

Sick and dizzy, I scramble to my feet, and even reaching over my shoulder for an arrow sends a shock of pain through my ribs. But I have to stop her. There is no what if I can’t. Weapon, weapon, I need a weapon. Come on, think. What do I have on her?

I have her name. And she doesn’t have mine.

 _She’s angry and in pain_ , Aunt Thea said. _You can use that._

“Ilinca!” I bellow down the long hallway. “How long before you even knew she was dead?”

Her step falters. I stumble after her, not nearly fast enough.

“You didn’t show up for six months,” I go on. “They gave her ashes to a stranger.”

A noise of incoherent rage escapes her, but she keeps running.

“No one else gave a shit, and you know why?” I swallow hard. Then I force the words out: “She was trash.”

Shaula rounds on me with a snarl.

I can’t quite swallow down the bile rising in my throat, but my lip curls in fierce satisfaction. “You think you cut ties for her own good? Bullshit. You knew she’d hate everything about who you became.”

She flicks her wrist, tossing the long knife in the air and catching it in an overhand grip. She takes a step toward me.

“Imagine the look on your sister’s face, if she could see you. See the blood all over your hands.”

Finally, fucking finally, she leaps for me.

On her first wild slash, she tears right through the kevlar and opens a gash in my forearm. But I get a hold of her, and now this is _my_ fight. Scorpions strike hard and fast; they don’t try to wrestle you to the floor once they’ve stung. I’m bruised to hell, pain lancing through me with every movement, but in a clinch fight all I need is a good solid underhook, and she’s mine.

I shove an arm under hers, and there. The throw slams her facedown on the floor, and she shrieks in fury as I get a knee in her back.

“Shut up,” I grit out through my teeth, catching hold of her wrist. “Shut the hell up!”

“I am al-Shaula,” she screams. “I am al- _Shaula_ , and I will peel the flesh from her bones!”

I twist her arm into a hammerlock. “You are not getting anywhere near the doctor’s daughter, you fucking psycho.”

She goes still beneath me, which is smart if she only wants her elbow to bend one way. But then, low and throaty, she starts to laugh. “Death is coming for her, Archer.” She twists to look me in the eye, and I force her face into the carpet. But it doesn’t muffle her. “A life for a life, and for wounds retaliation.”

I dig my knee deeper into her back.

Under the pressure, Shaula chokes out, “She dies in agony, I swear it to you. You cannot stand in the way of His vengeance.”

A cold, calm voice in my head says, _I can sure as hell slow it down_. Let’s see her escape prison with two slashed Achilles’ tendons. Let’s see her throw knives at my family with the ligaments in her shoulder all torn to hell. What happened with Risdon doesn’t have to happen with her. I can make sure of it.

My fingers tighten around her neck and wrist.

An uneven tread behind me grabs my attention. Aunt Thea limps up next to me, pointing the .38 at the floor, finger on the trigger guard. She stops just out of reach, takes aim at Shaula’s head, and says, “Why don’t you let him pat you down now?”

Shaula glares poison back at her. “What punishment waits in hell for those who betray their lords and benefactors, Ar-Raqis?”

“That’s not my name,” Aunt Thea says. “Hold still, or I will kill you.”

Shaula doesn’t move a muscle.

“Are the bodyguards all right?” I ask Aunt Thea, sliding my hands down Shaula’s sides and snagging a set of lockpicks out of a concealed pocket.

“One’s fine, two are injured but stable. Doctors can put them right back together. I don’t know about the fourth.”

“And the girls?”

“Safe and hidden. They’re going to be just fine.”

Shaula starts laughing her low, throaty laugh again.

Let her laugh. She lost.

I disarm her very thoroughly, and when I’m done there is a pile of glittering sharp things on the rug next to her. Then I gather them up, dump them into my quiver, and take up a post next to the window. I draw on Shaula’s head, and we wait.

It doesn’t take long before we hear sirens. Pretty good response time for SCPD, after the busy night they’ve had.

When they come through the door, I’m out the window.

The comm clicks in my ear; it’s Watchtower unmuting her end. Abruptly I remember that she heard everything I said to Shaula, and my stomach churns.

“Are you all right?” Mom murmurs in my ear.

Out in the alley, I throw a leg over the bike, which hurts like hell. I lean down to turn the engine over, which hurts like damn. “Going to be sore for a few days.”

She draws in a sharp breath. “Oh, honey. You want me to meet you in the lair?”

“Nothing you can do for bruised ribs. Go make sure all our people are okay. Aunt Thea couldn’t find one of them.”

“Okay,” she says quietly. “I’ll see you at home.”

I make it to the lair, paying half-hearted attention to the back-and-forth on the comms as Panoptic and SCPD get the scene sorted out. SCPD found Jones out in the garden with a knife in his guts, and they’re rushing him to Starling General now. Chacko and Selby both took nasty blows to the head, but only Chacko has regained consciousness. They don’t know yet if Selby will wake up at all. Ramirez was nearly choked to death, and we’ll get more of her story when she can talk again.

In the basement level garage, the bike’s engine mutters into silence, and I pull off my helmet. The smell of exhaust and motor oil and WD-40 roils my stomach, and I climb off the bike.

Stiffly, my body moves through familiar motions. Moving carefully to save my ribs, I wipe down the bow and quiver and hang them up. I drape the jacket and hood on the mannequin.

Halfway to the locker room, I catch myself on the corner of the med table, swallowing the sudden, nauseated flood of saliva. The shit that came out of my mouth, the ideas that came crawling out of dark corners of my head… I would have killed her, if she hadn’t batted those arrows out of the air. I didn’t even hesitate.

How many times can you twist yourself into some hideous shape before you can’t spring back anymore?

Maybe I never sprang back at all.

Deep breath. They were just words, and they got the job done. I tried to kill her, but I didn’t.

My phone buzzes with a text. Abby’s picture flashes on the screen. _Ok?_

I swallow. Swallow again. _Fine_ , I text back. _Coming home_.

I lay with my hot forehead on the table a little longer, and then I get my ass in gear.

As I come up the driveway to the house, an ambulance pulls away with lights flashing but no sirens. Inside the house is full of quiet murmurs and staticky police radios. Captain Hall and her favorite minions have arrived to conduct interviews.

In the foyer, I interrupt an officer’s questions to reach for Chacko’s hand. “Thank you.”

Gently she feels for the edges of the butterfly bandage on her forehead. “It was the Arrow, really.”

Do not fucking argue with me right now, woman. I squeeze her hand harder. “Thank you.”

She gives it a little shake, and she nods almost imperceptibly. “Of course, Queen. It’s my job.”

When I come into the living room, I find Abby sandwiched between my parents on the sofa and Aunt Thea sitting with an arm around Tish on the loveseat. McKenna Hall perches on the edge of the closest armchair, and her glassbook stands propped up on the coffee table to record the interview.

When she sees me in the doorway, Abby quietly gets to her feet and walks over to me, calm and unhurried as the night she walked down the Cuviers’ steps and straight into Dad’s arms. She’s planning to hug me, and I can’t tell her to go easy on my ribs in front of Hall.

I catch her by the shoulders, and I hold her out in front of me and look her over. “You ok, junebug?”

She seems to understand why I’m holding her at arm’s length, because she bites her lip anxiously before she says, “Just a little shook up, is all.”

She leads me by the hand past the armchair where Hall sits, regarding us neutrally. Aunt Thea vacates the seat next to Tish, going to lean on the back of the sofa, and I sink down carefully next to my girlfriend and lace my fingers through hers. Abby squishes back in between Mom and Dad.

Hall leans toward Tish. “And then?”

Tish tightens her grip on my hand. “And then the Arrow came through the door.”

“This is the third time he’s shown up for you, Miss Cuvier.”

Tish looks politely puzzled.

“Have you had any contact with him, outside of these encounters?”

Telling bald-faced lies to law enforcement makes most people hot under the collar. But the delicate mix of disbelief and total sincerity on Tish’s face makes me wonder for a second if she forgot I was the Arrow. “No, none.”

That’s right, baby. Do me proud.

Aunt Thea and the girls answer a few more questions, and then we finally have our house to ourselves again. The quiet feels strange after all the buzzing radios and flashing blue lights.

All six of us look around at each other, until finally Mom kisses Abby’s head and gets to her feet on a heavy sigh. “All right. I hate to go, but I should look in on Jones, Selby, and Ramirez at Starling General. I'll need to talk to their families.”

I start to get up too. “I should come with you.”

Mom waves me back down. “Stay here. You can visit in the morning.”

Leaning on the sofa behind Dad, Aunt Thea lets her shoulders slump. “What time is it anyway?”

“Not even ten,” he says.

Aunt Thea groans. “It feels later. I’m about ready to pass out.”

“Not in your room,” Dad says, glancing toward the hallway leading to it. “Everything smells like smoke in there. We’ll have it professionally cleaned tomorrow.”

“I put a bullet hole in the wall too,” she adds helpfully. “Big one.”

“Damn it, Thea,” Dad says, deadpan. “How will we match the paint?”

That surprises a chuckle out of the rest of us, and Mom comes around behind the sofa, puts her arms around Aunt Thea, and gives her a quick squeeze.

“You can have my room tonight, Aunt Thea,” Abby says, and she casts a hopeful look at Tish even as she says, “Tish and I can share.”

Next to me, Tish smiles. “Of course.”

God damn it. Should have called dibs when I had the chance.

Aunt Thea heads for the stairs, and Mom for the foyer.

Mom passes behind the loveseat on her way, and she reaches out with both hands to ruffle my hair and Tish’s. “I’ll see everybody in the morning.” Then she smooths down what she mussed and rests her hands on our shoulders. Over our heads, she meets Dad’s eyes.

He takes a breath, raises his chin, and then gives her one of those nods I can never decipher. She smiles faintly, and then she heads for the front door.

It’s only after she has locked up behind her that I realize I kind of needed her help with something. I sigh and turn to my all-time least favorite field medic. “Hey, Dad, you think you can stitch up my arm?”

Next to him, Abby forces a smile and says, “I told you not to tear my stitches out again.”

“I didn’t.” I raise my left arm and roll the sleeve up far enough to show her the temporary bandage I taped on. “This is a new one.”

Abby pales, takes a deep breath, and looks up at Dad. “I can suture it.”

I raise an eyebrow at her, then glance at Dad, who looks down at her with the gentle expression he wears just for her. So softly I can hardly hear, he says, “The kit is on the top shelf in my office.” She sits up slightly, but hesitates at the edge of the sofa. I don’t think she’s eager to go anywhere alone just yet. Dad lays a hand on her back. “Come on, I’ll reach it for you.”

They disappear into the hall, and Tish and I have the living room to ourselves.

She shifts to face me, and as she looks me over her hands come up hesitantly and then settle gingerly on my shoulders. “How badly are you hurt?”

“You going to kiss it better?”

She meets my eyes patiently.

“The cut on my arm is the worst of it,” I assure her. “Otherwise - well, I’m pretty much one big bruise. But that’ll fade.”

She takes a slow breath through her nose. “That’s inconvenient,” she whispers, gliding her hands down my arms. “I really wanted to hug you.”

I slide my fingers up the back of her neck and bury them in her hair. “Don’t squeeze too hard, and I bet we can make it work.”

She scoots as close as she can, braces one hand on the sofa behind me, and leans in just far enough to press herself against me without putting any actual weight on me. My fingers furrow deeper into her hair, and she brushes her cheek against mine, almost catlike. Then she presses her face into my neck and breathes in deep.

“You good?” I murmur into her vanilla-scented hair.

She answers with a kiss to the skin right under my ear.

Footsteps echo in the hall, and she pulls away. Abby comes in with a hand towel in one hand and the suture kit in the other, and she sits down on the coffee table right in front of me. “I thought Dad would at least, you know, supervise,” she says as she pops the kit open, “but he’s on the phone with Captain Hall again.”

I start rolling up my sleeve. “Dad sutures like he thinks the point is to leave the biggest, ugliest scar possible. I’m pretty sure I’m better off with just you.”

Abby smiles as she lays the towel across her lap, and I lay my arm across it.

Tish glances between us, and then she stands and kisses my forehead. “I’m going to go have a shower. You two come up when you’re ready.”

When she’s gone, Abby peels away my temporary bandage, and she only hesitates for a moment when blood wells up from the gash beneath. Then, with steady hands, she goes to work.

“Thanks for patching me up,” I say on the third stitch.

Abby murmurs, “Thank you for coming to the rescue again.”

“Yeah. Course.”

A long, weird silence follows while she works the needle in again.

Sometimes I am a big feathery chicken compared to my little sister. She opens her mouth first. “You didn’t think that I wanted you to stop, did you?” she says tentatively. “Arrowing, I mean.”

“I, ah.” That’s exactly what I was afraid she wanted. “I wondered.”

“I know how important it is. What you do.”

I watch the edges of the wound pull together as she tightens a suture.

“I’d be dead a few times over, if you weren’t the Arrow,” she says, eyes on her work. “I would never ask you to stop.”

I nod gratefully. Because I’d do a lot, if it was Abby asking, but I wouldn’t have done that. “It gets ugly, what I do.”

Her hands go still on my arm, then I feel the sting of peroxide. “I know. I saw.”

I stare hard at the replica black powder musket mounted on the wall, until the object loses all meaning and turns to a blur of black and brown.

“That night at the mansion,” she says quietly, mopping up bloody foam with gauze, “for a little while there, I hardly recognized you. But it was you, all the same. I still don’t know how I feel about everything that happened that night, but I know how I feel about you.”

The blur gets blurrier.

“I didn’t want you to stop. I just wanted the truth.”

I take a slow breath. “Abigail, last week I got to Maria Artigas just in time to watch her die of strychnine poisoning, and there wasn’t shit I could for her. She had this grimace on her face, muscles all locked up, and she finally suffocated after… after hours of just laying there, spasming.” I meet Abby’s eyes. “I’m not going to start telling you shit like that.”

Her expression softens. “Because you don’t want to traumatize me?”

I look to the ceiling for patience before I look her in the face again. “It’s got nothing to do with you. I just - I can’t bring it home with me, okay?”

Her eyes widen.

Then she slowly leans forward and headbutts my collarbone.

I frown at the top of her head. “Ok, now I’m confused.”

“This is what I’m asking,” she says into my shirt. “For you to talk to me, like you just did. You told me a real thing about…. I don’t know. About what it’s like.”

I cover her head with my hand. “Huh.”

“I’m not trying to make more demands on you or anything,” she says, all ready to walk that back. “You already - ”

“It’s freezing cold. That, or it’s an oven. It’s dead boring for hours, and then it’s way too interesting for about five minutes. Very few people are ever happy to see me.”

She sits up straight and goes back to work, and the needle bites into my skin.

“Sometimes I see things…” I flash on Terence Washington, dead in a landfill. By the time I found him, the critters had taken his eyes and tongue; they go for the squishiest bits first. “I see things I wish I hadn’t. Other times I wish I had one of those high quality National Geographic cameras, for when the fog rolls in around the Everglade Bridge just before dawn, or when you can see from the rooftops where a line of rain is moving in across the bay.”

“Wow,” Abby says in faint surprise.

“You said talk,” I mutter defensively.

She looks up, smiling. “I just didn’t know you could get so poetic about Starling.”

I shrug one shoulder. “She’s pretty.”

“She,” my sister echoes thoughtfully. “Your damsel in distress?”

I smile. “Oh, hell, no. Distressing damsel, maybe.”

She shifts her weight on the coffee table. “You’re careful out there, right?”

This time yesterday, I would have made all the right noises about how many precautions we take and how I might get some cuts and bruises, but nothing irredeemably bad would ever happen. But honestly? “I’m careful when I can be.”

“I don’t know what that means.”

“Job’s got to get done, junebug.”

She thinks that over for a long time, and I feel the steady slide of the needle and tug of the sutures. Finally she says, “Thank you for being straight with me.”

Guilt twists my insides. “Don’t thank me for that.”

“Okay,” she says readily. “Un-thank you.”

I'm obviously incapable of saying the right thing here, so I'm just going to say the honest thing. "Abby, the stuff you go through? I can't really wrap my head around it. Sad, I get. Tired and miserable, I get. But the rest of it? I just do not understand."

"Mostly I don't either," she says, and Jesus, when did my kid sister develop a cynical laugh?

Since the first time she woke up hyperventilating at three in the morning, I've asked her every variation of, What do you need? How do I help you? In three years, I don't think I've ever asked her this: "Can you tell me what it feels like?"

I thought I already knew.

"It feels like..." Once again, her hands go still on my arm. "It feels like I take up too much space. Like I want to be smaller. So small that I disappear. When it’s bad, I can’t imagine ever feeling any other way ever again, and I just get so tired thinking about having to live like that for decade after decade, and then I just want to not..." Apologetically, as if confessing yet another weakness, she says, "I want to not be here."

I lean down to catch her eyes. "Oh, Abby - "

"It's okay," she says quickly, hands on my shoulders to keep me still. "I'm not going to do anything crazy." Without looking up, she goes back to tying off the last suture. "I think it would mess Dad up for pretty much ever."

I take a deep breath and hold it to resist the voice screaming in the back of my head, _Tell her she better not fucking do anything like that, tell her Dad's not the only one who'd be fucked up forever, tell her that is not fucking allowed, tell her tell her tell her_.

But I'm not going to tell her anything. I'm going to listen.

“I’m afraid I’m just broken,” she whispers. “I’ll never work right, like real people do.”

Real people. Fucking hell.

She squeezes my wrist. “I could never be what you are.”

This time I can’t keep my mouth shut. I tip her chin up with one finger. “I don’t want you to be what I am, junebug. Not ever.”

She pitches forward into a hug - ow ow _ow_ \- but my arms come up reflexively around her.

“You’re my pain in the ass kid sister. Be that. And don’t go anywhere, ok?” When she nods against my shoulder, I say: “Promise me.”

“I promise.” Her next words are muffled in my button-down, but there's no mistaking them: “I love you, Jonny.”

My throat seems to be malfunctioning, so I just pet the back of her head until she’s ready to let me go.

Dad comes in, a bottle of Caol Ila in one hand and two lowball glasses in the other. He doesn’t say a word, just leans in the doorway watching Abby sniffle into my shoulder. I can’t make any sense of the expression on his face.

When she surfaces, Abby notices him standing there. She quietly gets to her feet and whispers, “Good night.”

“Night.”

Dad catches her for one more hug before she disappears upstairs.

Then he sinks into the chair opposite me heavily. “You looked like you could use a drink.”

I lean forward, elbows on my knees. “I could use the bottle.”

He smiles, pours me two fingers, and slides the glass my way.

“You tangled with an Assassin and didn’t die,” he says, and takes a slow, appreciative sip.

“Didn’t die?” I raise an eyebrow at him. “I won.”

He smiles into his drink, and it’s a little sad and tired.

Twelve people are dead who weren’t when Ilinca Nicolescu showed up in Starling. The ones I personally cared about are going to be fine, but those others - they aren’t coming back. I tip the glass back, and the whiskey is smoky and bitter on my tongue. “I stopped her, anyway.”

“You tangled with an Assassin,” he enunciates as if maybe I didn’t hear him the first time. “And you’re still alive. Trust me, that alone is impressive. Stopping her?”

I meet his eyes.

“I’d call that a win.”

I raise my glass to him. He mirrors the gesture, and we drink.

“I tried to put three arrows in her back,” I say, holding my glass balanced on my knee.

Slowly, he lowers his glass too. “But you didn’t.”

“Only because she was too fast for me.”

Dad nods, thinking it over. Finally he looks up and says, “Was there any other choice?”

“I don’t know,” I admit. “I didn’t stop to wonder.”

“Because it was family,” he says softly.

My fingers tighten around my glass. I nod.

He takes another sip of his drink. “Were you prepared to live with that? Being the man who killed Ilinca Nicolescu?”

“If it were the only way. Yeah, I think I could have been that guy.”

Dad looks at the floor. “I’m glad you didn’t have to find out.”

Quietly, we finish our drinks.

With the whiskey working its way into my bloodstream, I change into sweatpants and a T-shirt, and I find myself knocking on Tish’s door. A faint light flickers through the crack beneath it

“Come in,” Abby’s voice says.

I ease my head in to find Tish curled up asleep in the glow of a movie. It’s one of those period pieces full of English people in stupid hats who want to marry each other and can’t. Abby sits up next to her, wireless earbuds in, eyes glazed over.

“Can’t sleep?”

She shakes her head. “Not just yet.”

I come up to Tish’s side of the bed, and I run a hand over her hip. She stirs, opens her eyes blearily, and smiles at me. “Come lay down.”

I raise my eyebrows at her.

“Look, I’ll make room,” she murmurs sleepily, scooting toward the middle.

On her other side, Abby starts to slide out from under the covers.

“Abby, no.” Tish gestures her back in bed. “I didn’t mean for you to leave. There’s room for six people and a dog.”

Abby gets comfortable again. I climb in next to Tish, whose damp hair smells very strongly of her shampoo, and I give Abby fair warning before I turn off the movie.

“Sweet dreams,” Tish whispers.

They aren’t.

But when I jolt awake at four in the morning, the girls are right there, still curled up safe and sound. Tish has snuggled up against my side with her back to me, and her arms are tangled with Abby’s.

Everything is okay. Everybody's fine.

I sink back down into sleep.


	7. Chapter 7

When I walk into Ramirez’s room at Starling General the next day, Dig and Lyla are already there. They’re chatting with her, relaxed and casual. Ramirez’s badly bruised throat has swollen up too badly for her to talk, and she has her glassbook set up on the table over her lap to display messages as she types them.

I wave at her with the brown paper bag in my hand as I come in. “Hey, Daisy.”

Even in the shape she’s in, she narrows her eyes at me and types, _Don’t call me that_.

“I thought we’d known each other long enough by now that - “

“Nope.” Dig shakes his head, leaning back against the wall and folding his arms. “I still have to call her by her last name.”

“Her own mother probably has to call her by her last name,” Lyla says.

_Name me Daisy, you get what you get._

Lyla nods. “Then it’s a good thing I had Elaine address your invitation to Ms. Ramirez.”

Her brow furrows. _What invitation?_

“Big party before they run off to Kandahar,” I supply. “To be spies, probably.”

“We need you on your feet by then,” Dig says, reaching for her hand. “Ready to dance, even.”

Ramirez shakes it, and then she types, _Wouldn’t miss it, boss_.

“I’m not your boss anymore,” he says, smiling.

 _Course not, boss_.

Lyla laughs and reaches for her hand too, and they say their goodbyes. On their way out the door, they call back to me, “We’re going to go see Jones one floor up.”

“I’ll be up in a minute.”

When they’re gone, I hold up the paper bag, and onto the blanket next to Ramirez’s knees, I pour out Rubik’s cubes, magnet sticks, and wooden 3D puzzles.“You get first pick.”

Some of those things I’ve had since grade school, when Mom convinced my teachers to let me play with them in class as long as I did it silently. “Just try it for a week,” she told Ms. Callahan. “Punish him if he’s disruptive, but let him do something with his hands. He needs to fidget to focus.” Within days, I stopped kicking the legs of other kids’ chairs, and Ms. Callahan relented.

I still keep the puzzles in my desk, and half the bodyguards who come in will pick them up and fiddle with them. Back in May when it was me stuck in the hospital, bored and hurting, they helped keep me sane.

Ramirez looks them over and forces a smile. She won’t quite meet my eyes. _Thanks, Santa, but I’m fine_ , she types.

I shrug and set the bag down on the floor. Then I pull up a chair next to her, moving carefully with my bruised ribs. And my bruised everything. “I wanted to thank you.”

She glares at the footboard, and then she takes a raspy breath, and her fingers move over the keyscreen. _There’s really no need. I kind of fell down on the job._

I sigh, leaning back in the chair. “You held off a highly trained assassin for much longer than anyone else had managed - long enough for backup to arrive. And you nearly died doing it.”

 _Nearly dying doesn’t do anybody any good_ , Ramirez types irritably. She takes another glance at me, eyes overbright, before she continues. _If the Arrow hadn’t shown up, I don’t know how I would have explained what I almost let happen to your family._

I rub my forehead, right between my eyebrows, but most of my resentment right now is not aimed at her. I just hate the sudden realization that this is what Uncle Roy must have felt like, telling me to calm the hell down with the hereditary guilt complex. I can practically hear him gloating over my shoulder. _See? It’s really fucking frustrating, isn’t?_

My hand drops back down in my lap, and I meet Ramirez’s eyes. “Fine, you’re right. I take it back.”

She blinks at me in surprise, and then her mouth twists wryly.

I get to my feet, grab the paper bag, and start scooping magnets into it. “No toys for you.”

Finally, she smiles, and she paws possessively at the fidget puzzles.

I smack her hand away. “Nope. You didn’t fight off a crazy ninja singlehandedly. Naughty list.”

She laughs, which sounds kind of like a dying bear, and then immediately grimaces in pain.

“Don’t hurt yourself, Ramirez.” I roll a couple of puzzles across the blanket to her. “Here.”

She covers them with her left hand, and her right she offers to me to shake. When I take it and meet her eyes, she mouths, _Thank you._

“No, dumbass.” I roll my eyes in disgust. “Thank you.”

I take the paper bag with me when I leave. One floor up, Dig and Lyla have beaten me to Jones’ room, and she puts a finger to her lips when I come in. Jones is completely out of it, mouth slightly open, tubes poking out of him every which way.

“The nurse was just here,” Lyla whispers. “She said he was awake just a couple hours ago, cracking jokes and hitting on her. He’s expected to make a full recovery, and he’ll likely be released within a few days.”

“Selby still hasn’t woken up at all,” Dig murmurs heavily, watching me arrange magnet toys on the table for Jones to find when he wakes up. “They’re saying if he ever does, we can expect some severe brain damage. He’ll probably never be the same.”

My jaw clenches.

“Don’t leave magnets,” Lyla warns me, scooping the toys back into the bag. “They mess with the electromyogram.”

“Oh. I didn’t realize.”

She smiles at me, digging out wooden puzzles and fidget widgets. “These are good, though. Elaine liked these when she was tiny.”

With quick, practiced hands, she twists three fidget widgets into a unicorn and leaves it propped on the table next to Jones. Next to it, Dig lays down a card in a clean white envelope with Darius printed on the front.

We look in on Selby, who looks like a stranger with his head shaved and bandaged and the rest of him bristling with tubes. Dig and I stand in a quiet broken only by the faint beeping of machines, while Lyla makes a tiny colorful Dachsund out of wooden puzzle pieces.

I lay my hand on Selby’s shoulder before we leave.

Then we head for the parking garage together.

“How many people have you lost, all told?” I ask them in the elevator.

They don’t ask me to be more specific. “Eleven,” Lyla says quietly. “In several thousand cases over twenty-six years, we lost eleven bodyguards.”

“The pictures in the main hallway at the office - ”

“Yes,” Dig says. “Those are them.”

The elevator doors slide open, and we head for our separate cars.

When I get back to the office, I pass by those pictures on the way to the conference room. There are names under each of them, and sometime soon I’m going to stop and read them all. Right now I’m late for a debrief.

I find my parents and Aunt Thea seated around the conference table, police reports projected on the wall as usual post-violent mayhem. All three cast me tired smiles as I come in and sit down.

“Does McKenna understand who she has in custody?” Mom asks Dad. “SCPD is going to have a hell of a time holding on to her.”

“She knows,” Dad says. “She’s taking every supermax measure she can.”

“But they’re not really equipped to hold her long term.”

He nods, and there is distaste in his voice when he says, “That’s why ARGUS is coming to get her in three days.”

Aunt Thea turns to me thoughtfully. “Jon, did the creepy laughter concern you at all? Because it kind of concerned me.”

I start to fold my arms before I remember that presses against the bruises. “You told me yourself, Assassins trade in cheap psychological tricks. I was hoping it was a bluff. That, or she’s just completely unhinged.”

“I had the smoke grenade and the blade that cut you tested for poison,” Mom says. “Nothing. Whatever was so funny, it wasn’t that.”

I raise my eyebrows at Aunt Thea. “Are we worried about an accomplice?”

“It’s possible,” Dad says, leaning back in his chair. “But Shaula was perfectly capable of orchestrating last night all on her own. She had weeks to observe her targets, plant the fake bombs, and then set everything in motion when she was ready.”

“What about the fact that she knew right where the safe room was?”

Dad tilts his head at me, as if surprised it wasn’t obvious. “She blacked out the whole block and then followed the only light source in the house.”

“Oh. Right.” But there is one last thing. I lean forward in my chair. “She said something about ‘his vengeance.’ I took it to mean God, but what if she meant someone else?”

I don’t like the silence that follows.

At last, Dad says evenly, “Someone like Ra’s al Ghul?”

I make a who-knows gesture with one hand, then let my palm fall flat on the table. “It occurred to me. You guys have lost some credibility on the ‘who’s kicked it and who hasn’t’ front.”

“We burned his body and scattered the ashes in five separate places,” Mom says tartly. “One of which was the Pacific Ocean.”

“Thorough,” I admit. “So probably God.”

Aunt Thea nods. “The League had its own weird theology. Ra’s used to refer to a God of a Thousand Names, who worked through the League to maintain order in his creation.” Her fingers do just one drum roll on the table. “Half the names were probably ‘Destroyer’ or ‘Avenger’ or ‘Slayer of Kittens’ or whatever. ”

Dad’s gaze flickers toward the ceiling, and a very clear image pops into my head of him sitting through a sermon from an asshole who called himself the Demon’s Head, struggling heroically not to roll his eyes. “It’s a toss-up if he believed any of it himself. His followers came from all over the world, and he knew what every other cult leader has known since the beginning of time. You need a binding mythology.”

I glance around the table. “Does this mean we’re coming off red alert?”

Mom leans over glumly and props her chin on her fist. “I won’t feel better until she’s out of the city. Let’s call it orange.”

“So Tish is staying at the house another couple days?”

By the way all six eyes swing my way and all six eyebrows rise knowingly, I know I should have asked a few other questions before that one. Damn it.

“I invited her to stay this morning, yes,” Mom says neutrally. Her and Dad’s eyes meet briefly before they both look back at me. Then, as if suddenly remembering that I might want to know how that turned out, she adds, “She agreed.”

Aunt Thea gets to her feet, pressing her lips together against a smile. “I’m going to go hunt down some lunch.”

“I’ll come with you,” Mom says, abandoning me to Dad with a cheerful, “Dim sum?”

“No thanks,” I mutter.

When they’re gone, Dad clears his throat and turns his chair slightly to square up with me. “While your girlfriend is under our roof,” he says, “I’m going to ask that you both sleep in your own beds.”

I sigh heavily. “I thought Mom was bluffing.”

He nods, just once. “She was. This is me asking.”

“You?” I raise my eyebrows and nod appreciatively. “You are going to ask that.”

He looks back at me, unamused.

“You.”

He folds his hands in his lap and gives me his best poker face, which - I’m not going to lie - is pretty fucking good.

“So, that list TMZ compiled of all the women they caught you with,” I say slowly, “would you like that posted on the door of your study or mailed to your office at City Hall?”

Dad gives me a deeply unimpressed look, and then his eyes track his own hands running down the arms of his chair. “When that fishing trawler picked me up from Lian Yu,” he says softly, and I sit up straighter in my seat, “I hadn’t spoken to another human being for months. And before that, it had been several years since I’d been able to…” He rubs a hand across his mouth. “To truly trust anyone.”

I don’t know where this is going, and I never know what to say when Dad drops this kind of thing on me anyway. I keep my mouth shut.

“I came home, and there were people who cared about me, who wanted me to, ah,” he searches for words, appears to find them somewhere on the other side of the ceiling-to-floor windows, “to let them in. To be part of them, be part of a family again.”

I just wait.

“It took some time,” he says quietly, meeting my eyes again. “After however many years living in that man’s house, and after the things she’s been through these past few months, Tish might need some time too.”

I shift in my seat. She has been the one tapping the brakes every few miles, hasn’t she?

“Things between you escalated very quickly,” Dad says. “Intense experiences will do that.”

“I’m not with her just because the same psychos keep trying to kill us both,” I say, more harshly than I meant to.

“I didn’t mean to imply that you were,” Dad says mildly

I sit back in my chair, and I frown at the patch of table in front of me. “It’s not like she’s told me to back off.” I grimace. “Or not lately.”

Dad nods. “I’m suggesting you don’t put her in a position where she needs to.”

I look him in the eyes again. “I hear you.”

“Good.”

“But we’ll probably all be better off if you just don’t notice where I sleep.”

A smile quirks his mouth. “Fair enough.”

 

It will take us days to process the necessary documentation and after-action reports on Shaula’s attack. Three bodyguards in the hospital means a hell of a lot of insurance paperwork. I spend the rest of the day stuck at my desk, and as it turns out, the only thing that hurts worse than moving is not moving. By seven o’clock, I’m so stiff and sore and achy that I go lean my head in Mom’s office door.

“Hey, do you have anything stronger than ibuprofen?” I know she keeps a little orange prescription bottle in her purse for those headaches she gets.

Instead she looks me over with big, sympathetic eyes, and she gnaws her lower lip. “I’m going to drive you home.”

“You don’t have to do that.” But oh God, please do that.

She’s already snagging her purse from the back of a chair. “Just leave your car here overnight. You can lay down, and we’ll slap some IcyHot stickies on you.”

I can’t help smiling. “Don’t slap too hard.”

At home, we find Milena in the kitchen stirring an enormous pot of soup on the stove.

“Chicken noodle,” she says when we come closer. “Tonight, comfort food.”

Mom leans over and pecks her on the cheek.

Milena smiles and shoos her with a pot holder. “Go on, go sit.”

Abby and Tish come down for dinner, and the four of us sit down at the kitchen table. We don’t say much as we work through first and then second helpings. A kind of weary understanding seems to have fallen over us, and, at least for now, words feel unnecessary.

Afterwards, I head up to my room to change out of the suit and check on the bandage under my sleeve. It has that warm, spongy feel like I might have bled through it.

I’ve hardly got my tie off when a knock on my door surprises me.

Tish stands in my doorway in a silky robe, holding a first aid kit and a colorful box of IcyHot patches. “Your mom said you might need these.”

I step aside. “Come in.”

She’s never been in my room before. On some other night when I was less sore and exhausted, it might have been a thrill to watch her step into my space and see her eyes linger on my unmade bed. Tonight it just feels… nice.

She sets the box and the kit on my desk, and I sink into the desk chair and roll up my sleeve. The old bandage peels off easy, but it’s a bitch getting the new one on with one hand.

Tish reaches for me. “Here, let me help.”

I sit back and watch her face while she neatly tapes down gauze. But she doesn’t stop there. She reaches for my top button, and her eyes meet mine, asking permission.

I’m just a little banged up, not in traction. I can undress myself just fine. But I nod anyway.

Tish pulls me to my feet so she can untuck and unbutton my shirt, and then she snakes my belt out of its loops. She has to reach up on tiptoe to skim my undershirt over my head.

Her face falls when she gets a good look at the contusions covering most of my rib cage, still fresh and purple-brown. She swallows, and when she meets my eyes she forces a smile and says, “You did tell me you were going to be one big bruise.”

“It’s not so bad, if I don’t make any sudden movements.” I stick my lower lip out thoughtfully. “Or bump into anything. Or breathe too hard.”

Her smile turns more genuine, and she pats the coverlet at the edge of the bed. When I have a seat, she starts smoothing IcyHot patches onto the bruises. “Work was all right?”

“Pain in the ass, but that’s okay. How was class?”

“It’s Friday, so all I had was piano lessons. My last student’s mother really shouldn’t have brought him, though. I think he was sick.”

“So, sucked for him.” I catch hold of her wrist before she can pick up another patch. “But how are you?”

She takes a step closer to stand between my knees, and she presses her lips to my shoulder. “I’m glad it’s over," she says into my skin.

After she smooths on a third patch, she tugs the covers back invitingly. I shuck off my slacks, which she folds neatly and lays over the back of my desk chair, and I lay back where she told me to.

She slips her robe off her shoulders and lays it over my slacks on the chair. In her lacy nightgown she climbs in bed next to me, sitting cross-legged right at my side. The shy tilt of her head is so cute that, if it weren’t for the bruises, I’d grab her and squeeze her to my chest. Then she says, “Would you still like me to kiss it better?”

A small part of me launches into all kinds of ideas about where I want her mouth on me for maximum healing effect.

But most of me says, “I’d like you to lay here next to me.”

She sinks down, propped up on one elbow, and starts running her fingers through my hair. “I’m going to go back in my room in a little while,” she warns me. “I don’t think Abby wants to sleep alone just yet.”

“Just ‘til I fall asleep.”

She leans down to kiss me once before settling into the pillows. “Okay.”

 

After two days, I can move almost without pain. Panoptic has finally made a dent in the paperwork, and I have time for a late lunch with Mom.

“Every time someone comes after our family,” she says, scrolling through articles on her glassbook propped up on the cafe table, “your father’s approval ratings go through the roof.”

“Maybe I should take a shot at him myself.”

She smiles. “He’s going to have the backing he needs to finish cleaning out City Hall.”

“Some silver lining.”

“I’ll take what I can get.”

Honestly, so will I. Tonight is Tish’s last at our house, and she’s already packed to move back into her apartment.

“You want some company tonight?” I ask, standing in her doorway a little after eleven.

She scoots over to make room. After a really pleasant thirty minutes of company, I crawl up her body, wiping my mouth, and kiss her very thoroughly. “You know, at your apartment, we can be as loud as we want.”

She laughs. “Why don’t you come over for dinner tomorrow night then?”

“You mean dinner,” I give her waist a little squeeze, just over her hip, “or you mean dessert?”

She wiggles down deeper into the pillows, eyes half lidded. “You’ll see, won’t you?”

Chuckling, I spoon up behind her.

“ _Dors bien, mon ange_.”

But in the small hours, the jerk of her body wakes me abruptly.

I open my eyes to find her sitting up and panting hard. She turns to me, splays her fingers on my chest, and checks me over anxiously.

"Baby, what’s wrong?”

She stares right at her hand laid over the middle of my chest as if confused by what she sees. “He shot you.”

“Hey, I'm fine.” I cover her hand with mine, and I try to get a smile out of her. “Don’t you know I’m bulletproof?” When that doesn’t work, I reach for her face. “Come on, lie down.”

She does, and that’s when I realize she is shivering, skin hot as a furnace. She’s so pale, even her lips seem colorless.

I shove out of bed, head for the bathroom, and come back with water and acetaminophen. “Sit up for just a minute. I think you’re running a fever. Take these.”

“‘M I sick?” she says fuzzily. Then she makes a grumpy noise. “‘M sick. You should go in your bed.”

“It’s a little late for that, don’t you think?”

“Stupid flu,” she says, accepting the pills and the glass of water. “Student had it.”

Oh, great. It’s the flu, and I’m next, and there go our sex plans. We had very important sex plans, damn it. “Come on, get comfy.”

She takes the pills and bundles the covers thickly over her. When I slide back into bed, she snuggles close to borrow warmth, which is strange with how burning hot she feels.

Not an hour later, she stumbles to the bathroom and dry heaves for a while. I hold her hair and wet a cloth to wipe down her clammy skin despite her protests.

“Go back to bed. I’d rather you didn’t watch me do this.”

“Why?”

“It’s not terribly attractive,” she grumbles.

I look her up and down, shivering in her thin satiny nightgown, and I tell a white lie. “I’d hit that.” Off her glare, I clarify: “I mean, I’d make you brush your teeth first, but I would.”

She melts into a grudging smile.

The next morning, she doesn’t get out of bed.

“She’s sick?” Abby says.

“She still should eat something, if she can keep it down,” Mom says. “Something carby and bland.”

Weirdly energized by someone else’s need, Abby runs up and downstairs bringing Tish biscuits and seltzer water and pills. When I leave for work, she is busy hunting up a thermometer.

With the Archangel getting transferred into federal custody this evening, we’re starting the closing process on the wave of new cases from these past few weeks. Those meetings take most of the morning. The first chance I get, I call to check on Tish. She must fumble with the phone a bit, because I hear muffled noises when she picks up.

“Hey, baby girl, I hope you’re feeling better, because I have been thinking about dessert all day, and I had this idea - ”

“You do not want to finish that sentence.”

Oh, shit. “Abby.”

“She’s asleep, and, honestly, I think she’s getting worse. I called Elaine, and she’s going to come take a look at her in an hour or so.”

“Good plan.”

There is an awkward silence. Awkward for me, that is. Abby sounds totally at her ease when she stifles a giggle and says, “Baby girl?”

“Just tell her I called.”

Now she’s outright laughing at me. “I’ll tell her you’re a big goofy sap who can’t go four hours without talking to her.”

“She’s not going back to her apartment, is she?”

“No, we convinced her to stay another night.”

When I get home, I take the stairs two at a time and ease Tish’s door open. “Hey, you awake?”

The pile of blankets emits a plaintive, “No.”

I slip in, leaving the door cracked behind me. “Where are you under all those blankets?” I dig her out enough to press my mouth to her forehead. “You still feel hot."

“Don’t kiss me. I’m gross.”

She is a little gross from the fever sweats. “You think you’d feel better after a shower?”

She makes a grumpy noise.

“I’ll help,” I say, because I am a saint.

“A bath might be better. I can just lay there and float.”

“Bubbles?”

Finally, she smiles. “Yes, please.”

I start the hot water, sniff a few bottles to find the vanilla-scented stuff, and leave the tap running with foam piling up. When I come back, Tish is pushing herself up to sitting, her gauzy nightgown twisted and rumpled. She gets to her feet, and I frown at the way she sways. “You ok?”

She nods and takes an unsteady step. Then another.

On the third, her eyes roll back in her head. She crumples.

I’m across the room in a blink. I grab her on the way down, and she sags almost to my waist before I get my arms under hers. “Tish? Tish!”

Nothing.

I sink to the floor with her, lay her down, and tip her head back to clear her airway. She’s breathing, but shallowly, and she’s so pale her lips are the blue of a fresh bruise. Under my fingers her pulse flutters weak and thready.

Then she twitches in my arms, just the way Maria Artigas did in her last few minutes.

“No. No no.” A faint whine in my ear makes my voice sound very far away. “Wake up, come on. Look at me.”

“What happened?” a voice says from the doorway. Dad.

Please, just fix it, okay? Fix this, fix it, make this not be happening. “I don’t know. She just passed out.”

Dad shucks off his suit jacket as he kneels next to her, and he covers her up and tucks it around her. It occurs to me that she’d probably be embarrassed that my father just saw her in her thin, nearly see-through nightgown. Stupid thing to worry about, but it nags at me while he checks over everything I just checked.

She twitches again.

“She needs a hospital,” Dad says, getting to his feet and pulling out his phone. 911 connects fast, and I hear the faint, Where is your emergency? “4120 Providence. We need an ambulance. A girl - young woman, early twenties - just collapsed, and we can’t wake her.” He is so stark-raving calm that, as he talks, he has the presence of mind to lean into the bathroom and turn off the hot water tap. In the sudden silence, he says, “Yes. All right. Yes, this is Oliver Queen.”

He keeps talking, gesturing for me to lift her up, and he leads the way downstairs to wait for EMS. On the living room sofa, the twitches turn to shivers, and I do my best to hold her still even as she’s burning up in my arms. I wrap Dad’s jacket tighter around her, and I reach for the blanket draped over the back of the sofa. Tuck it in close.

Mom and Abby emerge from the kitchen, and after a clipped explanation, Abby hovers anxiously over the back of the sofa behind me.

“Can you start packing a bag, baby?” Mom tells her. “Change of clothes for her, a few toiletries, just in case she’s there overnight.”

All of a sudden, with something concrete to do, it’s like my sister is a different girl. She heads for the stairs with a calm, purposeful stride.

Then Mom comes to sit next to me on the sofa. She pulls an elastic from her pocket, smooths Tish’s hair away from her face, and ties it back.

“Mom.” The words come out choked and guttural. “That bitch was laughing when we tied her up.”

She meets my eyes, and then she pulls her glassbook from her purse.

“What are you doing?”

“Checking on Shaula’s transfer to federal custody,” she says, eyes on the screen and fingers moving fast. “If she’s not with ARGUS yet, I want to know exactly where she is.”

I hold Tish tighter. Abby comes downstairs with a pink quilted bag, and she sits down heavily on my other side.

We wait.

EMS response time is pretty damn good. When Dad leads the two EMTs into the living room, he is already giving them the rundown. They come with a stretcher, and it’s time for me to give her up to the professionals. I stand and lay her down as gently as I can.

But I can’t just let them roll her away. As the stretcher starts to move, I reach out and grab her wrist. “Wait. Can someone go with her?”

They look me over, and I must look fairly sane and reasonable, because the guy says, “If you want, yeah. We’ll take one ride-along.”

But if this is what I think it is, it can’t be me. I need to get out of here. I need to get to the lair.

I start to turn to my family, but Dad has already stepped up next to me. He wraps his hand around her wrist, and I feel a rush of gratitude.

The EMTs nod to each other, and they head for the door with Dad keeping pace alongside.

The moment the door closes behind them, Mom looks up from her glassbook and says, “Shaula is still in maximum security solitary at Iron Heights.”

“Do we think this was her?” Abby says, startled.

“It could have been any of a dozen poisons,” Mom says, scrolling fast. “The doctors can only do so much unless we identify which one.”

I start moving, heading for the garage and my bike.

“Where are you going?” Mom says, getting to her feet.. “We need a plan."

“Fine. Make one. I need the hood.”

“Jonny, what are you going to do?” Abby calls after me.

I slam the back door behind me.

On my bike, speeding down Duwamish, I ignore Mom’s attempts to hail me on the comm, and I activate my helmet’s bluetooth, reciting the code that routes it through the Arrow’s secure line.

“Now is not the best time,” McKenna Hall greets me.

My hands tighten on the grips. “Captain, I need a word with the Assassin.”

There is a pause. “Even if that weren’t completely illegal, I couldn’t make it happen in the hour and a half before the Feds pick her up.”

I lean harder on the throttle. “I said I need a word with the Assassin.”

“Tell me why, and I might consider it.”

I haven’t let myself think the words yet. Through my teeth, I say, “She poisoned Cuvier’s daughter.”

There’s a muffled, “Shit,” and then Hall’s voice comes through loud and clear: “How? Nicolescu has barely moved from that six-by-eight cell for three days.”

“I don’t know how, and before you ask, no, I don’t have a shred of evidence. But the girl’s on her way to the ER, and I know who’s responsible.”

“You’re going to have to give me more than that.”

“Something she said when I caught her for you,” I snap. “This was her. I know it was. I need to know what she gave her.”

There is a long, long silence before she says, “Meet me at the east rooftop service door at the prison. Don’t be seen.”

I let out a shaky breath. “I’ll owe you one, Chief.”

She answers with an ambiguous little hum.

Not until I’m in my leathers speeding to Iron Heights do I finally answer Mom’s hail. “What do we know?”

“Tish has been admitted to the intensive care unit, and they’re doing everything they can to slow the damage to her kidneys and prevent it spreading to the rest of her body,” Mom says calmly. “If we’re going to get anything out of Shaula, we’re going to have to - ”

“I’ll get it out of her.”

She takes a deep breath. “Threats are not going to make her talk.”

“Then give me a better idea.”

“We might have to bargain with her. There’s no time for anything else. Get her talking, figure out what she wants that we can offer, and maybe we can - ”

“She wants Tish dead! That is what she fucking wants.”

The Heights come into view as the highway curves, chain link and guard towers gleaming in the harsh lights.

Mom’s voice goes very gentle when she says, “Slow down and think. This isn’t the way.”

I turn the comm off. I’m not sure what I’m about to do, but I’m sure I don’t want my mother to hear me do it.

It takes me too damn long to get to the service door, working my way from a guard tower to a rooftop, waiting out patrolling guards at every stop. Only fifty-eight minutes now until ARGUS shows up to take Shaula into custody. I could level with them and ask for their help, but I don’t trust for a second that Waller will think one life is worth her time. She’s big picture, Dad told me once. Visionary, even.

Finally I scramble over the ledge onto the rooftop, and McKenna Hall stands in the shadow of the open service door. “There you are,” she says. “Come on. I have her in an interrogation room, and I can give you half an hour.”

She leads me through dark, empty hallways, twisting deep into the heart of the building. Her shoes squeak faintly on the tile, and my heart pounds against my ribcage so hard I’m surprised the noise isn’t drawing her attention.

We stop at a pair of doors. She gestures me through the one on the left, and she lets herself into the other.

I’ve never been in one of these rooms before. The painted cinderblock is broken only by the broad one-way mirror that spans most of the wall to my right. There is nothing in the harshly lit room but a metal table bolted to the floor, a chair bolted to the floor, and Shaula seated with dignity despite the prison orange.

Her olive skin looks washed out in this light, but she sits with her back straight and her chin high. Heavy duty restraints bind her wrists to the table, and her ankles are cuffed to the chair legs.

The door shuts behind me.

“Tell me what you gave her.”

She looks steadily back at me. Simply and with total finality, she says, “No.”

Rage washes over me. She’s not even pretending not to know what I’m talking about. I take a step toward her. “Tell me what you gave her.”

“My only family died in pain you cannot imagine,” she says quietly. “So will his.”

Her head rocks back with the punch. The crunch of her nose breaking only heats my already simmering blood. When she lifts her head, red runs down over her lips.

She licks it away and smiles. “What is it you believe you can take from me that I have not already lost?”

There’s a knife at my belt; it's the only weapon I dared bring in here with her. “You still have all your fingers. We could start there.”

“How old are you, darling?” she says, leaning across the table on her forearms. “You wear that scruff to make you look like a grown-up, but I’d be shocked if you were more than twenty-five.”

I yank on her hands until the cuffs cut into her wrists, and with just a little more pressure I’ll crunch bone. “Tell me what you gave her.”

She shakes her head, almost pitying. “You don’t have the first idea what you’re doing.”

I grab her collar and twist. She makes a faint, guttural noise, but she’s still smiling when I haul her up by the neck. She doesn’t even fight me while I choke her out.

This woman belonged to a cult that turned death into an art. Her teachers probably did things to her in training that I couldn’t dream up on my worst acid trip. All she has to do is wait me out - less than half an hour, that’s all - and she’s out of my reach.

I have nothing to threaten her with. I have _nothing_.

I release her and take a step back. My hands shake at my sides.

The door opens, and Hall stalks in with a pile of manila folders in her arms. She walks right up to me with a stony glare, and then she jerks her head toward the door.

“The girl’s already gone. You’re done here.”


	8. Chapter 8

The world tilts.

Businesslike, Hall drops the folders on the table and takes a seat. “Ms. Nicolescu, you’ve laid some impressive groundwork for an insanity plea. If you’re very lucky, they might put you in a hospital and look at you through a small window forever.”

I’m on a ten second time lag, trying to get my mouth to remember how to form syllables. “What did you say?”

Hall glances up at me. “Pronounced dead at Starling General.” She turns a tired, jaded look on Shaula. “A baker’s dozen in two weeks, well done.”

“She’s dead?”

Hall purses her lips at me, and her eyes soften in sympathy. “We can’t save everyone.”

The breath leaves me in a rush. Tish isn’t dead. I saw her an hour ago. Dad was with her.

“More likely you’re going to die in prison,” Hall tells Shaula, flipping through files. “Juries don’t take to poisoners. For some reason, they seem to think you’re cowards. That, or petty, vindictive hysterics.”

Shaula’s eyes narrow.

“You might have had a chance if your last victim wasn’t a pretty young girl. That’s extra points knocked off.”

I feel for the wall. Splay one hand on the cold painted cinderblock. Watch a corner of Shaula’s mouth curl.

Hall shakes her head. “You couldn’t just leave the rat poison under the sink.”

“Rat poison,” Shaula scoffs.

“Yes, you got a little pedestrian with the last one, didn’t you?”

“Oh, no." Pride glitters in the Assassin's eyes. “No, you see, I killed her first.”

She’s bragging. The bitch is bragging. I reach for the knife at my belt. Miss twice.

Hall sits back in her chair, and her head turns toward me ever so slightly.

“Orellanine, derived from mushrooms.” Shaula plants her palms on the table and leans forward. “The latency period can last two weeks. Longer, if it’s carefully prepared, and I was careful. In strong coffee, she didn’t even taste it.”

I stand up straighter. My hand closes on the hilt of the knife. But if I push off this wall, I don’t trust my knees.

I haven’t made a sound, but Hall’s head snaps around.

Shaula’s hands curl into fists on the table. “She’s been dead since before you even knew I was here, Captain.”

When Dig and I showed up on Tish’s doorstep to tell her she was in danger, we were already too late. When I promised I wouldn’t let anything happen to her, it had already happened.

The first time I kissed her, she was already dying.

My fingers tighten on the knife’s grip.

Hall gets to her feet, abandons the manila folders on the table, and comes over to me with her hands held carefully at waist level, fingers spread.

Shaula raps her cuffs sharply on the table. “Tell me, did she scream?”

Hall takes hold of my elbow, and in a very low voice she says, “We’re leaving now.”

At her back, Shaula throws herself against the limits of the restraints. “Tell me!”

I don’t resist when Hall tows me to the door and gestures me through. Shaula’s voice rises behind us, and the words don’t make sense. Romanian. I think she’s screaming at us in Romanian.

The door closes behind us, and in the sudden quiet of the hallway, the Chief presses two fingers to her ear. “Did you get that? Yes, orellanine.” Pause. She glances irritably at the door to our right. “Garcia, I don’t care what the scientific name is. Just contact Starling General.”

The world comes back into focus.

Hall’s hand falls to her side, and she looks up at me, nostrils flaring. “If you ever, _ever_ brutalize a prisoner in my custody again - ”

I grab her shoulder. “She’s not dead?”

Hall looks at my hand on her shoulder. “My team is contacting her doctors now. We might be in time to save her.”

My knees turn traitor, and I lean back against the wall. I want to slide down and sit on the nice, solid floor. I want to slump onto McKenna Hall and hug her hard enough to bruise. Instead I just tip my head back and breathe deep.

Hall politely refrains from trying to peek under the hood while I pull it together, but she presses her lips together tightly. “Miss Cuvier lied to my face. She’s a friend of yours. Isn’t she?”

No one needs to connect Tish to the Arrow. Not even Hall. I swallow. Lick my lips. “Not a friend, exactly.” Ah, crap, going to need to do better than that. “I’ve just kind of... kept an eye on her since the night Desilva burned down Cuvier’s lab.”

“Bullshit,” Hall says impatiently. “I would never have let you in there if I’d known.” Two deep breaths, and she lays a hand on my elbow. Her brows draw together, and much more gently, she says, “And I would not have done that to you.”

All I can do is nod.

She reaches for the doorknob to join the rest of her team in the observation room, and she murmurs, “Go on, get out of here, Archer.”

I can’t get to my bike fast enough.

  
  


At Starling General, Mom catches me rushing down the hall to Tish’s room. “Whoa, hey hey hey. Slow down. Calm down.”

“I’m calm!” I snarl.

She puts her hands up. “Sit and breathe for a minute.”

I don’t sit down, but I do suck in air, slow and deliberate through my nose.

“Before you go storming in there, let me just tell you what the doctors told us,” Mom says gently. “The anti-toxin seems to be working, and they’re very optimistic about her chances. There’s been extensive damage to her kidneys, but it’s reversible with VSG therapy.”

“Optimistic,” I echo.

“You gave her a better than fighting chance.”

I run my hands along the sides of my head and clasp them behind my neck, and I confess to the floor: “Hall gave her that. I didn’t do shit.”

Mom glances over both shoulders before asking me very quietly, “Jon, what happened at Iron Heights?”

I look down the hall, and a few doors down I spot the plaque marked 336. “Can I go in now?”

Mom’s head tilts. “She’s in a lot of pain,” she warns me. “They can’t give her conventional opioids, because they’ll react badly with the anti-toxin. I know you’re freaked, but do not upset her or scare her any worse than she already is.” She runs a hand down my arm. “Are you calm?”

I shift my weight, looking over her shoulder at that door. “Hall said she was dead.”

“What?”

“To get Shaula to talk. Look, I just need to see her.”

Mom steps out of my way.

Tish is grey with pain, curled up on her side, and she is definitely, definitely alive. Dead people don’t make those little whimpering noises, and they don't writhe arrhythmically in the sheets like that. Dad has dragged a chair up next to her, and she clings to his elbow where it rests on the mattress, forehead pressed to his upper arm. A pulse oximeter is clipped to her finger, and red tubes sprout from the inside of her arm, secured with medical tape. They lead to a tall, boxy white machine at her bedside. Next to it, the glass-screen of the medmonitor glows, and the ECG beeps at the same agitated pace as my own heartbeat.

Dad is keeping up a gentle murmur of, “Hold on, honey. It won’t be forever, I promise. Just hold on as hard as you need to.” He looks up at me in the doorway. “Jon’s here.”

She lifts her head and manages a smile for me.

Dad surrenders the chair. “I’m going to get coffee. Do you want anything?”

I shake my head and hardly notice him leave. I spin the chair to face the other way and reach for her with both hands as I sink into it. Tangle my fingers with hers. Stroke her hair. Pet her shoulder. Triple-check that she’s here.

“Are you okay?” she says.

“Am I - ?” I suck in a deep breath. “You scared the shit out of me.”

“Makes us even, by my count.” Then she hisses in a sharp breath. Her knees curl closer to her body.

My fingers twist in the fabric of her hospital gown. “Hey. What do you need?”

“Distract me?” she says between shallow, panting breaths. “Just talk to me, please.”

“Okay. Okay, um.” I swallow hard. “I ever tell you about the time I flipped a car?”

As a preemptive strike against my family, I start reciting the greatest hits of my questionable decision-making since puberty. Mom is going to be so disappointed when she pulls out the story of how Jonny broke his first rib - there was a roof and a pool and a dare - only to find that Tish has already heard it.

Every now and then, she interrupts with a whimper, and she squeezes my hand tighter. Sometimes she mutters something in French through her gritted teeth, and for once I recognize a word or two. It ends with a bitten-off sob, and those pained noises go straight to some primitive part of my brain that wants nothing more than to roar off and destroy something. Hunt down whatever’s making her sound that way. Stab it in the eye.

I lick my lips. “Can I do something? I don’t know, bring you something?”

She tightens her fist in my shirt. “You’re doing it.”

I look her over. “What if I moved you a little bit?”

“It hurts the same no matter how I move or don’t move.”

I sit on the edge of my chair, bruised ribs pressed right up against the edge of the bed. Slow and careful of the lines, I slide my arms under her upper body and pull her to my chest. She presses her wet face into my neck. As requested, I run my stupid mouth until I’m hoarse. Jokes, stories, whatever I can think of.

Then I feel her holding her breath.

“Don’t, baby,” I whisper. “Breathe through it.”

She takes one breath, holds it again, and squeezes my arm hard enough to leave red crescents in the skin. A strangled little noise escapes her.

I screw my eyes shut tight, and I swallow a couple of times before I can say, “You have to breathe through it.”

I think back to a broken arm in the park when I was about nine. Dad came running, but as soon as it was clear I hadn’t broken my neck falling out of that tree, he picked me up and dusted me off as calmly as if _emergency room_ were already penciled into our schedule for the day.

“Breathe in deep while I count,” I say, in the same low voice I remember Dad using. “One, two, three, four. Now breathe out nice and slow. Three, four, five, six, seven, eight.”

What was it he did to help my breathing fall into rhythm? I glide my free hand up her arm on the next inhale, and I count her through it again. Down on the exhale. After a few repetitions, her chest rises and falls in time with my hand.

“Good. That’s good. Now imagine yourself somewhere safe, somewhere you never have to be afraid. Think about how it feels. How it smells. All the little familiar noises.” When I feel her breathing even out, I press my cheek to her forehead. “Where are you?”

She pulls one of my arms tighter around her. “ _Je suis ici_.”

“I don’t speak French.”

Her only answer is to nestle closer.

I’m afraid I’ll hurt her if I hold her any tighter. I kiss her hair, and I pet her in time with her breathing until exhaustion overtakes her. When she’s definitely out, I scoot the chair down toward the footboard, and I lay with my head on my arms near her knees and watch the steady rise and fall of her chest.

Over the next few hours, people come and go. Dad brings energy bars and bottled water, Aunt Thea brings my Phi Psi hoodie, and Abby brings Tish’s phone with her music library. Mom brings news: ARGUS picked up Shaula without incident, and she’s on her way to a secure, classified location.

I rub my eyes and slump lower in the chair. “The hottest circle of hell, I hope.”

Dad looks over. “Purgatory, actually.”

The nurse on duty, a heavyset woman with her silver hair in a tight bun, pops in and out to pull up medmonitor data on the toxin levels in Tish’s bloodstream. On her first round, she waves Abby back into her chair. “Don’t get up, sugar. You ain’t in my way.” She does something mysterious with the interface of the dialysis machine. “Oh, she’s scrubbing up nice and clean. Looking better and better.”

On her second round, she gently informs us that visiting hours are over, and only one person can stay overnight.

“One of us can take the sofa here, if you want to sleep in your own bed,” Mom tells me, gesturing between herself and Abby.

I look at Tish, who lies utterly still under the tangled sheets, and whom I haven’t let out of my sight since I got here. I look at the heart monitor, which hasn’t been out of earshot.

I meet Mom’s eyes.

“Okay,” she says softly.

She and Abby gather up their purses, and Abby comes over to wrap me in a hug. “Call us if they tell you anything,” she says into my hoodie. “Or text, whichever you feel up to.”

“As soon as I know.”

“Don’t worry about coming in to the office tomorrow,” Mom says.

Abby gives me one more squeeze, and then they’re gone. The moment they’re out the door, the nurse comes in, holding out a pillow and blanket. “I don’t know how well you gonna fit on that little sofa, but you get comfy if you can, hear?”

“Thank you.” I set them on the sofa for later.

A little after midnight, the doctor on call comes to check on Tish. I hover near the headboard, arms crossed, while she dives into the medmonitor and pulls up a lot of strange graphs and diagrams. After a few minutes, she looks up with a smile. “She’s out of danger,” she tells me. “A day’s recovery time, and we can start repairing the damage to her kidneys.”

“She’s going to be okay?”

“Six weeks, and she’ll be just fine.”

I sink down on the little sofa.

“Let her sleep as long as possible,” the doctor says, gathering the holo projection in her fingers, laying it back on the glass-screen, and tapping out. “There’s no reason for her to be awake while the antitoxin is still working its way out of her system. We can give her painkillers once it’s clear.”

When the doctor is gone, I arrange the pillow and blankets as comfortably as I can, and I pull out my phone and text Abby, _Out of the woods_.

Then I try to lay down. I don’t fit well on the tiny sofa. I do not fit well at all.

Limbs scrunched up, blanket pulled up to my chin, I lay awake for a long time, listening to the slow, regular beeping of the heart monitor.

  
  


I wake twisted in the blanket, one hand draped on the floor, one ankle hooked over the back of the sofa. Obnoxiously bright sunlight pours through the windows.

A doctor I’ve never seen before stands with his back to me next to the medmonitor, and I can see the edges of a hologram he’s pulled out in front of him to show Tish. She sits up in bed, and though her skin is still a sickly shade of gray, she seems relatively comfortable for the moment. Her eyes have the slightly unfocused look of someone on excellent painkillers.

“The damage to your kidneys is reversible with a cutting edge viral somatic genetic therapy that can - ”

“The therapy pioneered by my father,” Tish interrupts with a bitter little shake of her head.

The doctor shifts his weight over his feet. “Yes.”

Tish closes her eyes, and she murmurs, “Dear Lord, Your mercy is great unto the heavens and Your truth unto the clouds, but You have a very twisted sense of humor.”

I chuckle, and she gives me a quick smile. The doctor glances over his shoulder at me, nods acknowledgment, and then continues giving her the rundown. The little crease between her eyebrows deepens and deepens as he describes the six-week schedule of VSG treatments she’ll have to undergo.

After he leaves, something in Tish’s mood seems to have shifted, and the little crease refuses to go away.

“Are you okay?” I say. “Do you need more painkillers?”

“Not now, thank you.”

But for the next hour, nothing I say can drag a smile out of her. More stories earn me only polite grimaces, and more jokes fall flat. Her expression gets more and more pinched, until she mutters, “Maybe more painkillers would be a good idea.”

I press the button for the nurse, and I start to pull up a chair and reach for her.

“No, don’t - don’t touch me,” she says irritably. “I feel disgusting, and I’m sure I look worse.”

One last stab at a giggle: “I’d still hit that.”

“Yes,” she says acidly, “it would have been tragic if I’d died before you had the chance.”

It feels kind of like walking into a telephone pole. “I didn’t…”

“I know you were joking,” she says impatiently. “I’m not in the mood.”

I retreat a few steps toward the sofa. “I’m sorry.”

She meets my eyes, and then she sucks in air through her nose. “Stop looking at me like that. If you can’t stand to see me upset, then go away and let me do it in peace.”

I glance at the door. “You want me to leave?”

But the suggestion only pisses her off more. “Do what you want, Jon.” And she curls up on her side with her back to me.

This feels like lose-lose. If I’m going to be wrong no matter what, I’d rather be wrong where I can see her. I sink down on the sofa, and I drag my glassbook out of my bag.

I’ve just finished answering the second of my sixteen unread emails when I notice Tish’s shoulders shaking. I don’t know what to do, or what she needs from me, or even the bare minimum for not getting my head bitten off. But I can’t just sit here while she cries. “Tish?”

Sniffles.

“I’ll shut up or go away if you need me to, but,” I lick my lips, “in case you don’t need me to, I’m, uh. I’m here.”

Without uncurling from her little ball of misery, she holds out her hand for me. The splotchy purple bruises on her arms from the dialysis look worse in the patch of sunlight falling across her body. I come around the bed, take her hand, and sink into the chair in front of her. She drags my arm to her chest and wraps herself around it.

“I hate this,” she says in a very small voice. “I hate all of this so much.”

Sometimes you don’t want to feel better. Sometimes you just want to hear someone say, “I know. I’m sorry.”

“I turned him in,” she whispers. “My own father - I gave him to the Arrow. And I buried those people, the ones who didn't have anyone. I don’t know what else I could have… But no matter what I do, I’ll never be free of him.”

“You will be. We’ll make sure.”

She squeezes my hand tighter and confesses, “I was a little upset, when I woke up and you weren’t here.”

I have to make a conscious effort to stay still.

“Don’t look guilty. I know where you were. But the only familiar face was your dad, and he was very nice about it, but...”

Dad was the most reassuring person who could possibly go with her - reassuring for me, that is. As of a day or two ago, Tish still had a hard time looking him in the eyes. And however embarrassed she would have been that he saw her in her flimsy nightgown, seeing her screaming and crying and cursing in French was probably worse.

She swipes at her eyes with her free hand, still sniffling. “He called me honey,” she says with a quirk of her mouth. “I guess he’s not so scary.”

That makes me smile a little bit. “You don’t ever have to be scared of him. Cuddly Funshine bear, remember?”

Finally, finally, she smiles back. “You didn’t deserve what I said to you,” she murmurs.

“Forget it. You’ve got a right to be cranky.”

“I do, don’t I?” She nods sharply and looks around at the door. “Now where the hell is my Percocet?”

I laugh, and I go find it for her.

  
  
  


Starling General releases Tish two days later with six pages of written instructions about her diet, water intake, permitted activity, and a schedule of visits for VSG to fix her trashed kidneys.

“Is there anything else you’d like us to bring from your apartment?” Dig says when we show up to bring her home. At her confused look, he clarifies: “To bring to the Queens’. You probably shouldn’t try to manage by yourself for a few days.”

“And stop looking guilty,” I say.

She doesn’t. But she doesn’t protest either.

When Dig gestures Tish through the back door , Abby and Milena are the only ones home. “We figured you’d be starving after three days of hospital food,” Abby says at the counter, gesturing to the spread on the kitchen table, “so here’s real stuff.”

“It is all on the list the doctors gave,” Milena assures her.

“Thank you,” Tish murmurs, and Dig shadows her to the head of the table and takes a seat nearby.

They’re still there, popping cold blue grapes into their mouths and watching Milena teach Abby to make a roux, when Dad gets home. He drops a kiss on Abby’s head as he comes around the kitchen island, and she half-ducks it to keep an eye on her skillet. “I have to keep it moving, or it will burn,” she tells him.

“Oh, excuse me,” he says wryly, and then he leans down and kisses the top of Tish’s head too. “Feeling better?”

She looks up at him wide-eyed. Her mouth opens, then closes. She nods.

He smiles at her, and when he turns away, Dig gets to his feet and stands over her, reaching for the paper towels. He conveniently blocks her from view while she blinks away tears.

She spends a week with us.

I take a few days’ personal leave, and we hang out on the sofa, a lot like we did over the summer with my bum leg propped up on pillows. We talk for three hours straight and then hardly say a word for six. She gets lost in her glassbook and seems to forget I’m there, and then next minute she’s hyperaware of my every move. We watch _The Quiet Man_ three times, until all I have to do is mutter “homeric” in a terrible Irish accent, and she cracks up.

Her next pick is a World War I romance all in French, and I shake my head. “I can’t do subtitles.”

“You hardly notice them after the first few minutes.”

“Yeah, people say that, and I don’t know what the fuck they’re talking about.”

“I love this movie. I know it by heart. I’ll translate.”

She drapes herself on top of me, head on my chest, and as the narration starts, she murmurs: “Every time Manech’s wound throbs, he feels her heart beating in his hand.”

“This isn’t going to end well,” I mutter.

“It was World War I. Very few happy endings. Now shush, you’re missing important things.”

You would think, with all this relaxation, that I might be able to actually relax. But I catch myself doing the rounds, checking the windows, tallying up who’s in the building, and identifying every footstep I hear. When Tish’s friend Ryan shows up to bring her more schoolwork, they fumble the notebook between them, and he freezes right in the middle of a quick lunge to catch it for her. He looks right at me. Then, much more slowly, he picks up the notebook and presses it into her hands.

I unclench my fists and consciously relax my neck and jaw. Look at the floor.

“Jon?” Tish says gently once he’s gone.

“I know, I know,” I mutter, shoulders scrunching up. “I’ll chill the fuck out.”

But I can’t.

Two nights later, Dad comes and finds me in the living room after dinner, and he sinks down next to me on the loveseat in the space Tish has just vacated.

“Back at Panoptic tomorrow?”

“Yep.”

“So things are starting to go back to normal.”

“I guess so, yeah.”

He nods, rolling his lips together thoughtfully. My back stiffens, because I can see him thinking over how to say what he’s about to say, which never ever means we’re about to have a good-natured debate about the Archers’ playoff chances. Eventually he settles on: “You think it might be time to shift into a lower gear?”

I raise an eyebrow. “What do you mean?”

Again, he takes a second to think about it. “You’ve got your back to an interior wall,” he starts slowly, “a good line of sight on the doors and windows, and a knife in your jacket. When Tish was in here, you watched her like a hawk, and now that she’s gone, your phone is face up next to you.”

I swallow. “Should I not be doing those things?”

“You can’t live on red alert,” he says gently. “You’ll make yourself crazy. Her too, eventually.”

I turn my phone face down. “Situational awareness, Dad. You’re the one who drilled it into me.”

“There’s situational awareness, and there’s hypervigilance. One is training, the other is trauma.”

“I’m not the one who got traumatized.”

Dad gives me the gentle, patient expression I’ve seen him give Abby when he found her tucked into a little nook, hiding from the world. “You lost someone you love.”

My breath catches. I look away.

His hand comes to rest on the back of my neck. “You didn’t really - you got her back - and in a few weeks she’s going to be fine. But for you, she was dead for two minutes.”

I have to blink the burning feeling out of my eyes.

Dad rubs my back, which only makes it harder to swallow the lump in my throat. Then he tugs my shoulders sideways, and he wraps his arm tight around me.

“I made a promise,” I say, in a voice rougher than I’d like. “Said I wouldn’t let anything happen to her.”

“You kept it.”

“Doesn’t feel like it.” I duck my head. “The hood, the bow, this person I’ve twisted myself into - what the hell good is any of it if I can’t even protect the people I care about?”

“If you hadn’t brought Shaula in, there would have been no one to interrogate. You held up your end. SCPD held up theirs.” His grip on my shoulder eases, and he adds, “We don’t do this alone, Jon.”

I let my spine just sort of melt, and I lean into Dad’s side while I get my breathing under control. He just runs his hand up and down my arm - up on the inhale, down on the exhale - until the world unblurs, and I’m ready to get up.  



	9. Chapter 9

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for reading this far. It has been an absolute pleasure working on this story and hearing from you all.
> 
> Special thanks to Rosie Twiggs, Abbie, and Lady Chi, without whom this would never have been finished.
> 
> I sincerely hope you enjoy.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please note: the end of this chapter contains explicit sexual material. To avoid it, stop reading after our leading man and lady get home from Snug Harbor.

 

The middle of October brings a week of frigid wind and rain.

We brace ourselves for weeks of zombified Abby that never come. She and I meet in the kitchen at odd hours a few times, and on the nights I slip into Tish’s room to find it empty, I know it’s because Abby didn’t want to sleep alone.

But she holds it together. She gets out of the house, sees her friends. She goes shopping with Elaine for a dress for Dig and Lyla’s going-away party. She drags her grades back up to passing, she starts rehearsals for “A Christmas Carol” at the Lyric, and at home she plays fetch and carry for Tish.

“She doesn’t need to do that,” Tish tells me one night after Abby has brought her meds.

I pass her the glass of water she can’t quite reach on the coffee table. “I think maybe she kind of does.”

“The doctor switched her from an SSRI to an SNRI,” Mom says when I mention it at lunch. “Maybe we finally found the right antidepressant.”

Maybe. Whatever’s going on, it works. Let’s not mess with it.

Tish’s first night back in her own apartment is my first back in the hood, and I spend it sorting through a bunch of terrified bullshit from the Three-Sixteen. Over the next couple of days, I track down the four who killed those Jokerz. The night I drop them off on Hall’s doorstep, she meets me in the alley and looks me over thoughtfully.

“Who left a lipstick print on the Arrow?”

I blink. Swipe at my face where Tish kissed me good luck. “Been rescuing damsels. Sometimes they thank me.”

“Kid,” Hall says with the fondest smile she’s ever given me, “you are so full of shit.”

It’s two in the morning when I make it back to the dark alley where I left my bike. I’m about to pull my helmet on when I hear the rustle behind me.

I spin and draw in one motion -

Only to find myself pointing an arrow at about five pounds of fuzz posturing at me from a bed of newspaper. The puppy can’t be more than a few weeks old, but he’s got his hackles raised and his little needle teeth bared at me.

“Sure, sure, it’s your alley, I get it,” I mutter. “No need to be an asshole about it.”

One of his front paws leaves the ground, and one floppy ear tips forward.

He’s pretty pathetic, honestly. Ribs showing, crawling with fleas, fur a little patchy in places. I bet he’s got worms like crazy. He’s going to need weeks of careful looking after to get him in half decent shape.

Then it hits me. I know what I have to do with him.

“Calm down, little guy.” I make myself small. “Shhh, shh.”

He hunkers down against the brick wall as I approach, ears laying back.

If your tone is soothing enough, the words don’t matter. I keep up the sing-song puppy voice: “Stay still, dumbass. And don’t you dare bite me, or I will fuck you up.”

He falls all over himself trying to shrink out of my reach. When I grab him, he goes still except for the faint, terrified shaking. For lack of a better way to carry him on a motorcycle in the middle of the night, I shove him down the front of my jacket and zip up everything but his face. “You probably have fleas, don’t you, you filthy rat?” But there’s nothing else to do with him.

He’s too petrified of the engine’s roar and the rush of air blasting by to do anything but tremble all the way back to the lair.

It takes three baths and several hundred passes with a fine-toothed comb to rid him of the fleas crawling all over him. My clothes go directly into the wash too, and I let the mutt have the run of the lair so he can air dry while I wipe down my leathers. Bad idea. He takes a piss in a corner. Grumbling, I clean up after him. He fluffs up as he dries, busily sniffing everything he can get his nose into and skidding a little on the smooth floor.

I dig in the mini fridge for something to feed him. Mom’s yogurt will have to do. I peel open a cup of Blueberry Breeze and set it on the floor. “Come here, dog. Hey. Come.”

He sticks his nose out, but he won’t come close while I’m standing over the food. When I back away, he shoves his face in the yogurt cup and drags it under Mom’s desk to devour it.

“Listen, you now know the location of the Arrow’s secret lair. This is highly classified information. Knowing it could make you a target for my enemies. Can I trust you to keep your mouth shut?”

There are snarfing noises.

“Good.”

I text my mother - _sleeping at Panoptic tonight_ \- and I make up a bed of blankets under the table for Dog.

 

When I come through the front door at breakfast-time, I’ve got Dog zipped into my jacket again. I find my family at the kitchen table and Milena at the stove.

“Jon, what is that?” Mom says, frowning at me.

I head straight for Abby. Pull the zipper down. Dump five pounds of squirming puppy into her lap.

The look on her face, man. Best fucking idea I have ever fucking had.

Dog crouches nervously on her knees, and then she holds out the back of her hand for him to sniff. When he seems satisfied that she is a girl and not a puppy-eating monster, he lets her scratch him behind the ear. Tentatively, his tail starts to bat back and forth, tapping the table leg.

“He’s a skinny little bastard, but he’s cute, right?”

Abby gapes at me. “Where did he come from?”

“Alley behind Vincent’s.”

“Please tell me you washed him before you brought him in the house,” Mom says with faint horror. She has never, ever liked dogs. I wasn’t allowed one when I was a kid, precisely because Mom could “only handle one loud, messy, hyperactive agent of destruction in the house at one time.”

“He had, like, three baths,” I say, and Dad tears his sappy expression away from Abby and Dog long enough to catch my eye. I think that’s pride I’m seeing in his smile.

“He is so fuzzy,” Milena says ruefully. “There will be hair everywhere.”

Well, yes. There is that. “Sorry, Milena.”

“We did not agree to keep him!” Mom protests.

The rest of us - including Milena - stare at her. I think Dad’s pleading expression is actually more convincing than Abby’s.

“Okay,” Mom grumbles. “But he is not allowed on the sofas. Or in our room. And if he is _your_ dog,” she says, glaring between me and Abby, “you two had better be the ones feeding and walking and training and cleaning up after him, you understand me?”

I point at Abby. “He’s her dog.” At her startled expression, I gesture to Dog. Paws on her chest, tail going like crazy, he gives her nasty unsanitary dog kisses. “Look, he already loves you more.”

“Do not give him people food!” Mom says, a half second too late. Dog practically inhales the slice of sausage Abby slips him.

“He’s got to be some kind of shepherd mix,” Dad says. “Maybe with some border collie. He’s going to be fifty, sixty pounds at least.”

Oh, I know. Big enough to tear the face off of anyone who tries to lay a hand on my sister while I’m not around. See? The dog was an awesome idea.

After she buys his love with scritchies and smuggled sausage, Dog follows Abby around vigilantly, keeping track of his new favorite sheep.

Mom tries not to trip over him, and when he jumps up on her legs, she holds out a stern finger and says, “Manners.” On the refrigerator she posts a list of the places the dog is not allowed: _our bedroom, the guest bedrooms, any sofa, any table, any counter, any surface from which humans eat…_

Dad maintains a dignified distance from Dog, except for buying a heated bed, a fountain water bowl, two fancy leather leashes, enough rawhide chews for a kennel of hunting beagles, and ridiculous gourmet treats for an animal that would undoubtedly eat cat shit if permitted. When he thinks no one is looking, Dad crouches down, murmurs, “Hey, buddy,” and rubs Dog’s fuzzy ears.

After much deliberation, Abby names the mutt Percival.

“Percy,” I whine to Tish, chopping onions in her tiny kitchen while she scoots minced garlic around a hot skillet. “I give her a perfectly respectable dog - like, a real dog, not a stuffed animal - and she goes and names him ‘purse dog.’”

She looks up from the saucepan, smiling. “How much do you know about Arthurian legend?”

“About what?”

“Sir Percival was one of the three knights worthy enough to find the Grail,” she says, casting a knowing look over her shoulder at me. “Chivalrous. Courteous. And he would never allow harm to come to a lady, especially to a queen.”

“Oh, God.” I roll my eyes. “Really?”

She turns back to the skillet. “I think it suits him.”

I shrug, setting the knife aside and rinsing my hands clean. “I guess that’s the idea,” I say, coming to stand right behind her. “He’ll make a big, scary guard dog when he’s grown into his paws.”

She leans against my chest, tipping her head all the way back to smile at me upside down. “That’s not why you gave him to her.”

The answering smile spreads across my face before I even realize it’s there, because - God, this girl. She makes me feel _seen_. I kiss her forehead. “No. It’s not.”

Abby needed something to take care of. A wormy, half-starved mutt seemed like as good a thing as any.

My sister spends weeks getting Percy up to a healthy weight, flushing the parasites out of his system, and housetraining him. For his part, the dog devotes his entire being to her as only a dog can, and he turns out to be scary good at reading her moods. The first time Dad watches Percy wag and cuddle and snuffle Abby down from an anxiety attack, he has to actually sit down with relief.

The dog starts sleeping at the foot of Abby’s bed. One morning I go into her room to wake her up, grab a pillow, and raise it to smack her. In a flash, Percy is standing over her, not growling but just watching me.

With extreme prejudice.

“Mom,” I say at work a few hours later, “have we looked into a canine division?”

She looks up and makes a moue around the pen she’s been chewing on. Then she sets it down and smiles. “Sounds like a project for our managing director.”

“Yeah, I guess it does.”

 

 

 

Two weeks before Dig and Lyla leave for Afghanistan, Mom leans into my office and says, “I think it would be nice if you said something at the going-away party.”

I shrug that off, hardly looking up from my glassbook. “I’m not much for speeches.”

“You were great off the cuff, yelling at several thousand people from the top of the Convention Center with floodlights in your eyes.” She takes a few ambling steps into my office. “This will be cake.”

I did that from behind the mask, which is as much a layer of protection as the kevlar. And it wasn’t personal. I lean back in my chair, gripping the arms tighter. “You’re the new president. Isn’t this more your area?”

She pulls a classic mom move: folds her arms, gives a little shrug, and repeats, “I just think it would be nice.”

God damn it. Maybe I can bribe Abby to write it for me.

That evening when I go down to the lair to train, Dig is waiting for me. He hasn’t been down here in months, but he sits at the grindstone putting an edge on a flechette as if he never left.

“You heard Selby woke up?” he says when I reach the bottom of the stairs. “Lyla and I went to visit this morning.”

“Yeah, I heard. They say he’s still pretty out of it.”

“He didn’t recognize anybody but his wife while we were there.” Dig sets the flechette aside and flips the grindstone off. “Can’t talk at all. Might have to learn how again.”

“But he’s got a shot.”

Dig plants his hands on his knees. “Yeah, he does.”

I shift my weight onto my back foot. “You, ah, came down here to tell me that?”

He shakes his head. “I was thinking one last lesson. You know, old times’ sake.”

I smile. “Yeah. Let’s do it.”

We go to work like we’re training for a championship again, and for the first time in my life, I manage to throw him a few curveballs. It’s been some time since we last sparred, and I’ve picked up a thing or two. Dirty tricks from the street. Theatrical feints from Shaula.

“You’ve been paying attention out there,” Dig says with approval.

“What, no criticism in the feedback sandwich?”

He grins. “That left hook was a mess.”

“There we go.”

He puts me through my paces, and then he gets down on the mats with me like he hasn’t in years. It takes me back to high school, when he was the voice in my ear rather than Mom. "That nelson is going to be real easy to slip from this position. Try again.” or “Nice work, keep your form solid.”

I remember him standing next to me at the edge of the ring at Regionals, and both of us locking eyes on my last match across the way. Dig folded his arms. “This McGinnis kid is taller, heavier, and two years older than you.”

I narrowed my eyes at the dark-haired guy pacing the other edge of the ring. “What’s he even doing in this league?”

“This is his last tournament. He ages out in a month.” Dig turned all his attention on me. “Now you’ve been watching him fight all day. What have you noticed?”

“He’s fast. Mean right straight, but he’s best on his feet. Get him on the ground, and he struggles.”

Dig nodded along. “So what are you thinking?”

“I’m thinking I’m going to kick his ass.”

It was years ago, but I still remember the way he clapped me on the back. “Then let’s see you do it.”

Tonight, we wrap it up with the ground fighting he drilled into me so well, and without saying a whole lot we get showered and changed.

_Never mind about the speech thing_ , I text Abby on my way out the door. _I’ve got it_.

The night of the twenty-first, we send Dig and Lyla off in style.

Most people my age have no idea that Generations Hall, the kind of place that tour guides call “a Starling City institution,” used to be the hottest club in the Glades during the first wave of gentrification. Very few people of any age know that the basement used to be Team Arrow HQ.

“We had to give it up after Slade,” Mom told me. “If he could bust in on us, who else could?”

Dad and Aunt Thea sold the place to one of Dad’s college friends (his second college, he clarified when I asked, glaring at me), and to this day the guy gives Queen Consolidated preferential rates for events there.

Tonight, the place is golden with candlelight, and the live band is setting up onstage.

Arm through mine, Tish twists around to take it all in. On my other side, Abby whispers, “Is this where…?”

“Yep,” Mom says behind us. “Now come say hi to Ms. Ramirez.”

The first person who greets me is Dig’s nephew A.J., who has flown in from Coast City. Maybe it’s just his perfect military posture and his unflappable stoicism, but I always get the feeling he vaguely disapproves of me. Granted, the few times he met me in between deployments, I was a hyperactive little shit who interrogated him about guns and tried to show off what Dig had been teaching me. I doubt that Sergeant First Class Andrew Diggle, Jr., whose day job was disassembling roadside bombs, found me half as impressive as I thought I was.

“Good to see you, Jon,” he says, giving me a firm handshake. He has always called me Jon, since long before it occurred to me to complain about being called Jonny.

“You too, man. It’s been a while. And this is my girlfriend, Tish.”

She takes a step forward at the slightest pressure of my hand on the small of her back, and I catch myself smiling again as she offers her hand. Maybe it’s weird to get a thrill out of introducing her to people, but I’ve done it six times tonight and it still hasn’t gotten old.

“Tish Cuvier,” A.J. says, shaking her hand. “The singer, right?”

She smiles. “Mr. Diggle said you’re something of a musician yourself.”

“Uncle John likes to exaggerate,” he says, chuckling and shaking his head. “I just play a little blues guitar on the side sometimes.”

“He’s full of shit,” I advise Tish. “See the band setting up? He used to play gigs with those guys when he lived in Starling.”

They’re pretty good too. Once they get going, they have the floor full within three songs. The crowd from Panoptic vies with Dig and Lyla’s Army buddies to see who can party harder, and Jones is back on his feet and leading the charge for our team.

I have not forgotten which of our people worked Tish’s protection detail last year, and I have definitely not forgotten which of them “hated to see her go but loved to watch her leave.” When she goes to say hello, I stand just behind her, because it’s hilarious how squirmy they get at one raised eyebrow.

Tish declines to dance - she still gets tired easy - and shoos me onto the floor with Mom and Abby and Elaine. Aunt Thea comes over to keep her company, and soon the two of them are surrounded by older men with close-cropped hair telling stories like, “And you got no depth perception in NVGs, so the dumbshit just lah-dee-dah-dee-dah, walks right off the fucking roof. Lands in some poor lady’s herb garden.”

Mom and Dig are dancing nearby while I twirl Elaine, and I hear Dig say, “Canine division, huh?”

She enunciates a little too carefully when she informs him, “It was Jon’s idea.”

“All those years of begging, and when he finally gets one dog, he manages to wrangle himself a whole kennel full.”

“Go big or go home,” I call over my shoulder. Then I spin Elaine over to her dad and hold out my hand to Mom. “Come on, swap.”

“Just not too many spins, honey,” Mom says, accepting my hand. “I’m kind of drunk.”

For a whole song, I only spin her once, because I am an excellent son. But as it winds down, I can’t help myself - I bet I can make her yelp if I dip her suddenly enough.

“Ahh!”

There we go.

Mom smacks my shoulder when I set her on her feet. “What is wrong with you?” she demands, and then falters on the next step.

Laughing, Dad rescues her from me. “Come on, time to sit down.”

Not long after, as I’m putting Elaine’s girlfriend Jodie through a spin, I notice Abby leaning over to talk to the guitarist. A few last measures, and then the band launches into “What a Wonderful World.”

Over at a candlelit table, Mom and Dad smile at each other, and he gets to his feet without having to be dragged and offers his hand. There are only a handful of people on earth my father will dance with, and all of them are named Diggle or Queen. There’s exactly one song he’ll do it to without grumbling, and this is it.

Watching them, Abby looks deeply pleased with herself, until Dig scoops her onto the floor too.

I go find Tish, and I hold out my hand. “Come on, just one? Nice and slow.”

She smiles and puts her hand in mine. “One.”

Her skin is warm through her dress, and her hair smells good, and she moves at the lightest touch of a lead. Steps and spins and sways, her fingers cool on my upturned palm.

“Have I told you yet,” she says, head tipped back to look up at me, “how much I like you in a suit?”

“No. Tell me how much.” When she smiles at the floor, I lean down and do my best Sean Connery growl. “As much as you like me out of it?”

“Oh my God, Jonathan.” But she glances over both shoulders, and then she smiles at me. “I don’t like anything as much as I like that.”

I straighten up laughing.

A little after eleven, Elaine and I sneak out to the parking lot, and we pull supplies from her car. We tie strings of cans to the back of Dig and Lyla’s sleek SUV and spray silly string flowers all over the windows. Then Elaine tamps down the giggles from that fourth martini and, with exaggerated care, fixes on the elaborately decorated sign that says JUST RETIRED.

She stands back to survey her work, folding her arms and tipping her head sideways. Her expression goes soft and wistful.

I bump her shoulder with mine. “You going to miss them?

She smiles at me. “I will, but that’s not what I was thinking about.” She turns back to the sign. “Our parents are a lot to live up to.”

I just tip my head back and have a good long chuckle.

“Yeah, yeah.” She smiles and leans her head against my shoulder. “Who am I talking to?”

“I hope, when I’m their age…” But I don’t know how to say it. The marriage, the family, the business - but it’s more than that. It’s the people who trust them, who look to them. Thirty years together, and somewhere along the way they did something really fucking right.

“I know,” Elaine murmurs. “I hope so too.” She lets out a little sigh, laying her hand on my elbow. “Jodie and I have been looking at rings.”

Was it only last Christmas that I would have taken that like a suckerpunch? God, it feels like a lifetime ago. I grin at her and give her a little jostle. “You need ideas? Skywriting. Scoreboards. Musical numbers.”

She jostles me right back. “I’ve got it covered. Know what I’m going to say and everything.”

“So go for it, Lanie.”

She hums happily. “I think I’m gonna.”

When we slip back into the party, the band has gone silent, and Mom is stepping onstage and gesturing to the lead singer for the microphone. When he hands it over, she turns to the crowd and gives us all a rather tipsy smile. “Hi.”

“Jon.” Dad nudges my elbow. “Go. Get up there.”

I start slipping past people on my way to the stage.

“Oh, look, my husband’s worried I’m going to babble at you and embarrass myself,” Mom says wryly. “But you know, I really haven’t done that in years. You don’t need to send Jon rushing up here. All I was going to do was introduce him anyway, I wasn’t planning a variety show with a dance number and fireworks. Although I saw some of you on the floor tonight, and now I’m thinking auditions for backup dancers - oh, there you are,” she says when I step up next to her.

“Yeah, here I am,” I mutter, and she presses the mic into my hands. And then - well, then there’s a microphone in my hands. “I, um.” I turn to Dig and Lyla, seated closest to the platform, and I try to pretend there aren’t a hundred people looking at me, some of them through the viewfinders of cell phone cameras. “I wanted to say something - ”

“Which I did not put him up to,” Mom assures everyone, leaning toward the mic.

I close my eyes. “Which now all of you are convinced she put me up to.”

Dig shakes his head, swatting that out of the air, and Lyla leans forward expectantly.

I shift my grip on the mic. “When I was eight years old, I had kind of a problem sitting still and shutting up.”

“When you were eight?” Jones yells, to general hilarity.

I nod sarcastic thanks to him. “Yeah, my parents got kind of fed up with all the detentions and concerned talks with my teacher, and right around the time they were ready to strangle me and bury me under the house, Dig stepped in and saved my skin. He said focus could be learned. Said he could teach me.

“Then he told them how he planned to teach me, and Mom rolled her eyes and said, ‘Sure, let’s take a kid with impulse control issues and teach him to punch people in the face. Brilliant idea, John.’

“It was actually Lyla who said, ‘No, the kid can handle it. He’s not going to do anything stupid.’ She had approximately zero evidence for that, but she’s hard to argue with, you know?”

Chuckles. They know.

“So Dig took me to Panoptic’s gym, and he sat me down and asked what I thought would happen if I misused what I learned with him. If I used it to hurt someone who was no threat to me. Or if I used it to settle stupid scores or bully other kids or generally act like a jackass.”

“I didn’t say jackass,” Dig protests. “You were eight.”

“You said jackass,” I assure him. “And I told him that my mom already explained that I would be in trouble so deep they’d still be digging up bits of me a thousand years from now and radiocarbon dating them.

“Dig said, ‘Oh, so you know,’ and that was it. We got started. Actually, he spent the next hour teaching me how to stand, and I didn’t get to throw a single punch, and I decided the whole thing was bullshit and I didn’t want to do it anymore. But Dig was convinced - just utterly convinced - that martial arts were going to help me. So he taught me to stand, and then he taught me to move, and he taught me to step and slide and pivot and sprawl. He wore me the hell out, which definitely helped with the sitting down and shutting up.

“And then one day he taught me to throw a right straight.”

“Could still use some work!” someone calls out.

I point in the general direction of the voice. “I will knock you on your ass.”

“Not in your nice suit,” Mom says earnestly, and I really need her to take a step back out of mic range.

I sigh. “Anyway, as you all know, I embraced the Tao of Diggle and never got in trouble ever again.”

The people who know me are laughing. Or at least giving me tolerant smiles.

“But seriously, whatever other shit I pulled, I didn’t break his rule.” I bent it as far as it would go. I used what he taught me to settle some drunken altercations before they could escalate, I used it to show off to my friends, and I used it to impress some girls. McGinnis and I used to tussle at parties when we knew we had an audience, and it never fucking failed. But not one of my arrests was for assault and battery, and there was a very important reason: “Dig took a chance on me. He trusted me to be better than that, and I couldn’t screw that up.”

He meets my eyes. “It’s been fifteen years. You still haven’t.”

I swallow, and I look away. “When I went to my first interview at Panoptic, I was expecting to sit down with Lyla. You know, Lyla, known her my whole life, spat up on her a few times as a baby - that Lyla. And instead I met with this terrifying stone-faced lady asking me all these questions about why I wanted to be there.”

Knowing noises from the crowd. Everyone interviews with Lyla. Absolutely everyone.

“I can’t even remember what I told her, but I definitely remember what she told me. ‘This isn’t like other jobs. People are depending on you, and you don’t leave that at the office door at the end of the day.’”

Dig looks down at Lyla and smiles softly.

“She let me shadow her for a year,” I continue, “and after a while she started letting me review casefiles and conduct threat assessments. Then when she was feeling really brave she let me talk to clients. Eventually she just drop-kicked me into the deep end and stood there at the edge of the pool with her arms folded to see if I’d drown.”

“Wow, Jon,” she says, setting her wine glass aside. “Thank you for talking me up. Really.”

“I’m saying you took a gamble on me.”

A smile plays over her mouth.

“You both did, when you brought me into Panoptic.” I look around the room, and if you counted up the skull tattoos, there is probably enough ink here to print a novel. Bodyguards and riflemen and private security forces and fire support specialists - you don’t do what we do with perfectly clean hands. "I know I can't be the only one."

Not far from me, two of the Iraq vets look at the floor. Ramirez looks right at Lyla, and her eyes well up.

“So thank you,” I say turning back to the Diggles. “You guys go see the world. Have a good time, and don’t worry about us. We’re not going to screw it up.”

Dig’s jaw is very tight. It’s Lyla who gets to her feet, and she doesn’t need a microphone to be heard in the perfect quiet.  “Looking around this room,” she says, “I know we’ve built something bigger than just us, something that’s going to last beyond us. I think the last few weeks have proved, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that we’re leaving it in good hands.” She meets Mom’s eyes with a quiet smile.

_Thank you_ , Mom mouths.

“There are some people who can’t be with us tonight,” Dig says. “You know who they are, and you know what they’ve meant to Panoptic. You know what they’ve meant to me and Lyla.”

I took a long look at that wall full of pictures at the office. The first three of the eleven were all on the same day - May 14, 2019 - when the League of Assassins tried to raze the city. The last is Uncle Roy, smiling over his shoulder at the camera with one eyebrow raised.

Lyla raises her wine glass. “Gone but not forgotten.”

The whole room echoes her words, and glasses flash in the candlelight. Aunt Thea’s hand shakes faintly as she puts her glass down.

Dig allows a moment of silence before he says, “Thank you for twenty-six incredible years.”

Maybe we could have left it at that, but Ramirez is a maudlin drunk. There are tears running down her face when she salutes Dig with her glass - “Boss” - and then Lyla in turn - “Boss.”

They turn to her, smiling.

“It’s been a fucking privilege.”

In the laughter that follows, we all drink to that too.

When they drive away not long after, cans clattering behind them, dozens of voices calling after them, I catch a glimpse of Mom and Dad standing on the steps. They have their arms around each other, and they’re not waving or yelling or craning their necks to see better. They’re just watching. Watching the car out of sight.

Dad looks down at Mom when she sniffles, and he murmurs something in her ear.

She smiles, meeting his eyes, and they go back inside. No one can find them for the next twenty minutes.

I don’t ask if anyone has checked the basement.

 

 

 

The first week of November, Tish gets the official stamp of full recovery, and the first thing we do is go to Snug Harbor for Throwback Night.

Dancing with my girlfriend Tish is a different experience from dancing with my friend Tish. The last time the bouncy pop turned to dirty blues, she decided it was a good time to go get a drink.

Tonight, she straddles one of my legs and presses close. Her hips roll with the guitar riffs, her feet skim the floor in perfect sync with mine, and she leans all her weight into my hands without hesitation. _You can rock me, baby, you can rock me all night long_ , the guitarist mutters into his mike, and Tish hooks one knee around my leg.

On the next peal of the horns - _just keep on rocking me, little girl, 'til my back ain't got no bones_ \- she throws her head back and swings sideways with her back arched over my hand. Then she rolls her body back up against my chest, and her hair tumbles forward over her shoulders.

Oh, hell yes.

My hands slide low, low, low on the small of her back, and I can grind her against me as hard as I want. I can half-turn her, tug her back to my chest with her arms crossed over her middle. I can spin her again, loop her arms around my neck, sway us both slow. _Want you to roll me, baby. You don’t know how you make me feel._

I could do this all night.

But Tish still gets tired easy, and not long after midnight she goes up on tiptoe to ask, “Are you ready to go?”

On our way to the door, the bartender warns us, “Hey, Queen. Heads up, there’s a professional asshole with a camera waiting outside.”

Seven months ago, the controversial mayor’s fuckup son got shot by the guy who assassinated the previous mayor. Seven weeks ago, the daughter of mass murdering genius Abel Cuvier was the last attempted victim of the Archangel. Now those two crazy kids are dating. It was too much to hope that no one would give a shit.

Tish bites her lip. “Do you have a big piece of paper and a marker?”

On the back of a poster for last week’s gig, she writes: _www.bridgehouse.org. Please give the attention to someone who needs it._

I laugh, shaking my head, and I feel an odd and probably inappropriate sense of pride. “Thanks for making me look like an asshole by comparison.”

She gives me her most innocent smile. “I wouldn’t dream of taking credit for that.”

We make it to the car well hidden behind her sign, and we close the doors behind us laughing. As I slide neatly into traffic, Tish sits up eagerly in her seat. Eyes shining, she says, “Take me home?”

“Yeah, that’s the - oh.” I can’t stop the grin spreading across my face or my lead foot sinking down on the gas. “Yeah?”

She raises an eyebrow at the needle spiking on the dash display. “Only if you stay within ten miles per hour of the speed limit.”

I stay within twenty.

“Close enough,” she says when I throw it in park in front of her apartment building.

She drags me inside by my shirt front.

The door has hardly slammed behind me when I lift her, hike her up high on my body, and wrap her legs around me as she sucks frantic kisses down my neck. It’s not far to her neatly made double bed, and she lets out a giggly shriek when I let us tumble onto the down comforter. We strip each other’s clothes off in clumsy, overeager tugs. I scoot down until my legs hang off the mattress, and I hook her knees over my shoulders.

“God, you’re already wet.”

“I’ve been waiting for you to undress me since the last song.” She looks warm and happy and calm, laying with her hair spilling over the pillows. There are none of the jitters as when she told me she’d never done this before.

Once the ladies first policy has been upheld - “Jon Jon _Jon_ , oh my God, Jon” -  I roll a condom on, and now it’s me who’s nervous. I want this to be good. I want this to be crazy screaming good.

She reaches for me, smiling. “Come here.” Her knees part, and I settle in the cradle of her body.

I need to be inside her right now now now, buried as deep as she’ll take me, need to hear the way she says my name when I bottom out, need her, all of her, now.

But I hesitate, braced above her, licking my lips. “I’ve never been anybody’s first before.”

I see a hint of dimple. “I’ll walk you through it.”

I laugh, and something untwists in my stomach. “Okay.” I kiss her once, long and lingering. “You want me inside you?”

Her eyes are big and liquid as the first time I kissed her. She nods. “Please.”

I drag her hand down between us to help guide me, and as gently as I know how, I push into her.

She gasps right next to my ear, and I freeze.

“No, that was good,” she says, wrapping both arms around my shoulders. “Don’t stop.”

Got to be slow. Sink in slow. I love the way she clings to me, the way her thighs tremble around my hips.

Then she tightens around me hard and fast. “Oh, oh, oh.”

I freeze again. “You ok?”

Her muscles are still clamped tight around me, and she shakes her head into the crook of my neck. “Hurts.”

“You’re all tensed up. Try and relax for me. Deep breath, and just relax.”

It takes three deep breaths, but I feel her body soften and her muscles release. “Ok,” she whispers. “Keep going.”

She gives a surprised little, “Oh,” when I’m all the way in.

“Does it hurt?”

“No. It just feels… full. Weird, but not bad.”

“Not bad? We can do so much better than that.” I lever myself up, leaning back and tilting her hips upward to make space. Then I pull her hand down between us again. “Here, touch yourself.”

I set up a slow, gentle rhythm, even though every muscle in my lower back is twitching to shove in deep and take her hard. She does as I told her, and her knees fall open wider, heels dragging up the backs of my thighs and over my ass to dig into the small of my back.

I allow myself a smirk at the way she moans beneath me. “You like that?”

Her head tips back. “I love that.”

If she keeps making those noises, I’m not going to be able to keep up the slow, gentle routine for very long. “Try something for me?”

“Sure.”

I scoop an arm behind her back, lift her off the pillows, and sweep them onto the floor. Then I roll us over and slide backwards to sit up against the wall. Her legs fold at either side of my hips, and she sits up straddling me. “There. How’s that?”

Her eyes widen at the change in angle, and she grips my shoulders like an inexperienced swimmer clinging to the edge of a pool. “You’re putting me on top? I don’t know how.”

My hands splay over her hips. “Move however feels good.” I push-pull, back and forth, just the way my ex used to like. “Try that.”

Carefully, Tish rocks her hips, and it must feel as good for her as it does for me, because she shivers and says, “Will I hurt you if I - ?”

“Really unlikely. Go on, do it.”

She grinds down, hips rolling forward, and I feel a flood of heat.

“Oh, that must have been good.”

“Yeah,” she breathes. “It really was.”

“Don’t stop. Come on, sweetheart, ride me how you want to.” And I bend my head, close my mouth around her nipple, and suck hard. Tish writhes in my lap, which I take as encouragement to bite down lightly. She grinds down harder, curls her fingers in my hair, and arches her back toward my mouth.

I pull free with a sucking smack. “Don’t know how,” I scoff. “You are going to come all over my cock without even touching yourself.”

“Oh God, Jonathan.” She rocks and grinds and squirms, faster and faster, nails dragging my scalp.

I turn my attention to her other breast, pinching the spit-slick nipple I’ve just released. My other hand slides low on her waist, then drags up her back to tickle between her shoulder blades.

“Slow,” I murmur into her skin. “Slow down.”

She sucks in a breath, and she does as I tell her. One long, luxurious roll of her hips, and I feel her muscles flutter around me.

It dawns on me: “You like when I tell you what to do.”

Eyes closed, she nods.

I harden my tone. “Look me in the eyes, Laetitia.”

Pupils blown wide, she obeys.

“Squeeze around my cock as tight as you can. Good. That’s so good. Again. Now grind down on it. Harder. Oh, honey, you are so good at that. That’s right, grind your clit against me.” I palm her tits with both hands, rolling one nipple between my fingers. “Tell me when you’re close. No, don’t look away. Look right here. Look in my eyes.”

It doesn’t take long. “Jon. Jonathan.”

“Come for me, sweetheart.”

It’s gorgeous. The bow of her back, the helpless O of her mouth. Then she melts onto my shoulder panting, hair damp with sweat and skin burning hot under my hands. She presses her face into my neck.

I want to wrap her up and keep her safe forever, but I also want to drape her over me like a security blanket. More than both of those things, “I want another turn on top.”

She hums agreement, still boneless on my shoulder.

I turn us over, which is tricky on the double bed if I don’t want to roll us onto the floor. She tries to wrap her legs around me, but instead I push one knee toward her chest, and she moans when I sink in that much deeper.

“Think you can take it a little rougher?”

“Try me and we’ll see.”

“All right.” I loop her arms around my shoulders. “Hold on to me, sweetheart. Hold on to me tight.”

Finally I can let go. Let my hips move how they’ve ached to since she first spread her legs for me.

And God, she feels so good, warm and slick and pliant beneath me. Arms around my shoulders, face pressed into the hollow of my neck. I scoop one arm under her back, trying to hold her closer, and I feel a wrenching gratitude that she’s trusting me like this, vulnerable to me like this, brave enough to do this with me.

Suddenly she freezes up.

“Tish?”

Her breath hitches.

I realize I’ve been talking. I’m trying to have the single most gorgeous moment of my life here, and my mouth will not shut up.

I replay the whisper in her ear - _love you, love you, fuck, Tish, I love you._

I’ve made girls cry during sex before. Wrong angle, too deep, and I accidentally hurt her so bad she curled up and sniffled until the pain faded. Sappy music, lots of eye contact, and she got so emotional we had to stop. Once I said the wrong name. No matter which way it happened, it always sucked.

Tish stares up at me, eyes shining wetly, and whispers, “ _J’espère que c’est vrai_.”

I don’t know what that means, but it sounds like it must be poetic. My hips buck, I shove in deep, and Tish makes a soft, satisfied noise in my ear. The orgasm is a gentle roller, not a crashing wave. For a moment, it feels like it might go on forever.

Then I come down, cheek pressed to her hair. She sighs when I pull out, and then she wraps me up tight.

“Can you breathe?” I whisper. “I hear I’m heavy.”

She hums a laugh. “I’ll need you to move in a minute, but don’t go anywhere quite yet. Just lay here on me, please.”

_What did you say in French?_ is on the tip of my tongue. But if we talk about that, we might have to talk about what I kind of sort of accidentally said to her. And which she did not say back.

A pathetic little whisper makes my stomach swoop saying, _Maybe she did_.

But no. If she’d wanted to say it back, she would have used a language I understood.

So let’s just pretend that didn’t happen.

Let me take care of the condom, and then we can crawl under the thick coverlet. I’ll grab the pillows from the floor and get us comfortable again - or close enough, on this cramped bed.

“You don’t fit,” Tish realizes with a soft smile, craning her neck to look at my feet hanging off the end of the mattress. She sits up and gives my knees a gentle sideways tug. “Here, lay diagonally.”

I rearrange the pillows and stretch out on my side. In the triangle of space left to her, Tish tucks herself against me, breasts pressed against my ribs and face against my chest.

“Comfy?” she says into my skin.

“Happy.”

She hooks her knee over my hip and nuzzles closer.

Let’s just lay here, skin to skin. Let me breathe in the warm vanilla smell of her.

Yeah. Let’s do that.

After all, we’ve got time.


End file.
